This November, the American Orff Schulwerk Association
(AOSA) will celebrate its 50th year at the annual National
Conference. I’m honored to be part of a panel discussing the next 50 years of
Orff Schulwerk and though this is months away, the Muse struck today and you
don’t mess around with her. When she talks, you listen! And write it down.
So here is my first draft talk for that event:
“In preparation for this panel , I read the transcript of a
similar panel trying to predict the next phase of the Schulwerk. The year was
1985, the place was Kansas City, the venue was the National Conference, which
happened to be the second one I presented at. We were all so much younger then!
The topic was titled Focus on the Future and the future the panelists predicted
is now the past we’ve lived through. Isn’t that interesting?
One of the panel members was the then-MENC President Donald
Corbett and I liked his opening remarks:
“To forecast the
future is difficult. Most of us are having a hard time trying to understand the
present!”
Ain’t that the truth! But it’s actually in trying to
understand the present that we create the future. We can babble all we want
with our predictions, but who ever would have predicted in 1985 a two-term
black President and what has followed? So best to look as deeply as we can into
what’s happening right here, right now, knowing our sight is short and we’re
too deep into it to see it all clearly.
One thing is clear. We live in a fearful world. Between
nuclear holocaust, terrorists far and near (and I’m included the mall shooters
here), climate change, overpopulation, the sense that the only qualification to
be in charge these days is to be unqualified, well, there’s a lot to be afraid
of. And the stakes are high. Not just attacks on our own freedoms and safety
and quality of life, but grave threats to our children’s and grandchildren’s
future.
But fear is not a good place to live. When fear kicks in, we
are biologically programmed to shut down our higher thinking and deeper feeling
skills to go into survival mode, down to the base of the brain where instinct
takes over and we essentially are given three choices: Fight, Flee or Freeze.
Our system gets flooded with chemicals to support us in any of the three
choices and all of this is good. It’s part of how we have survived as long as
we have.
But this is only good as a short-term response. If the
threatening signal, real or imagined, continues, at either high or low levels,
we are reduced to a perpetual state of non-thinking, just reacting impulsively
with our fists or our running legs or our frozen self cowering in fear. When
the fear comes from thunder or the bear at our campground or the truck hurtling
out of control, we react quickly and then exhale when it’s over. But if the
threats come from the way we’ve organized our cultural life and are ongoing,
it’s a deeper problem. We have to be cognizant of this atmosphere of ongoing
fear, much of which is purposefully manufactured to keep people under control,
keep them from questioning, keep them from thinking, keep them for feeling too
deeply and most important of all, to keep them shopping.
And it seems to be working. The rise of religious
fundamentalism, the shift from a public discourse of measured conversation to
rhetorical rants and insults, the giving-over of one’s personal power and
individual thought to the first demagogue who promises to fix it by getting rid
of the people who don’t look like you, these symptoms of fear are everywhere
around us. And it’s good for exactly no one.
And the children are suffering. They’re like the canaries in
the coal mines, their free, unfettered innocent song of delight now silenced or
reduced to tweets on bleeping screens. Kids come to school worried about peers
bullying them, worried about teachers shaming them, worried about parents
pressuring them to perform—and most crippling of all, worried about a shooter
entering the building. And unlike Forest
Gump, they can’t run for three years straight or stay curled up in a ball or
keep their hands clenched and their fists up all day long. So these manifest as
stress, anxiety, depression and even suicide and the rise of all this in our
children is well-documented. It’s not a pretty picture.
There are only two ways to fix this that will actually work.
One is to work collectively to reduce , to change, to do away with the
institutional practices of attacking, harming, hurting, refusing to see the
humanity of, the children and adults in our culture. We’ve done it before when
we passed the Child Labor Act, when the Civil Rights movement dismantled Jim
Crow, when the ERA was passed, when people who loved each other who happened to
be of the same gender were allowed to marry and so on.
The second is to replace fear with fun, to replace insult
with welcome, to replace blind faith with cultivated thought, to replace
ugliness with beauty. The only antidote to a child or adult who is shut down
because they understandably are trying to protect some tender part of
themselves from the brutal attacks of others, is to bring them into a safe and
protected and loving circle, where fun is at the forefront and they are not
only allowed, but invited to discover the beautiful expressive parts of
themselves and show it to the community and be affirmed and welcomed and loved.
That’s where real healing begins. And that’s what we hope we are doing in Orff
classes worldwide.
Turning this all to education, we see that fear is again
getting the upper hand. Administrators are fearful that teachers don’t know how
to teach and are making them teach some scripted lessons made by “experts” who
know exactly nothing about what that child in front of you right here, right
now, needs. And believe me, it ain’t a script. Teachers who signed up to share
their love and passion are having to jump through more and more unnecessary
hoops with either the goal or consequence of killing that passion. Our
scientific bent, which rightly belongs in places like helping solve climate
change, is out of its league when it thinks that teaching can be reduced to a
system and learning assessed by computers. The thought that teaching is about
relationship, a relationship that by definition is unpredictable, messy,
somewhat uncontrollable and not a problem to be fixed, but a dance to be
practiced, this is a difficult thought for the think-tankers who want to solve
things with systems, formulas and machines. But let’s be real. At the end of
the day, kids don’t need a curriculum or an i-Pad or a sure-fire kid-tested
lesson. They need a relationship with an adult prepared to see them and invite
them to discover more about themselves that they even knew before.
Relationship, not systems. For anyone who can look me in the eye and say that
computers and 26-step programs will make it all work, I dare you to tell me
about your marriage.
But this is not to say that we’re subject to the whims of
capricious emotion in our teaching. There is a great deal of structure and
thought and logic to the classes we create and cultivate, it’s good to have a coherent
plan and curriculum, it’s fine to have a few clear and measurable goals and
this is part of what any good Orff training is about. But it’s not the whole
story. We also have to develop our own artistry, feed our own passion for our
art and for teaching our art, bring the music wholly into our own body and
voice and gesture and facial expression and communicate directly to the
children from vibration to vibrations. We need to become friendly with our own
spontaneity, our own responsiveness (the responsive classroom), our own
attention to what’s going on in this moment right before our eyes and ears and
with that quirkly little person called a child. That’s where the art and
science of teaching meet and that’s where the children can begin to feel safe and
nurtured and held in the arms of something that is not only about mastery, but
is about community feeling, is about beauty, is about the unequalled joy of
creation.
I’m concerned that the success of Orff Schulwerk in American
schools is coming at a price. We’re starting to march to the school board’s
drummer, use all the ugly-non-poetic words trying to prove that we taught
something worthwhile, submitting our lesson plans to people who don’t
understand them, teaching with the required Smartboard or formula of
blah-blah-blah lesson objectives told to children who don’t care. Orff began as
a radical antidote to all of that. Instead of trying to fit in with the
bean-counters program, we need to show them how to grow the garden.
If I had any advice for today’s and future Orff teachers,
I’d say “Stay on the edge.” And walk your administrator there to show him or
her the view. When we are teaching the way Orff and his descendants proposed,
there’s not a single new education-du- jour approach that we’re not already
doing—and often much better. Trust that. Keep Orff weird, as the T-shirt says.
Not to be cool and eccentric, but because children are weird, art is weird,
good teachers are weird—in the best possible ways.
So here’s my prediction for the future. It will be exactly
as wonderful as today’s and tomorrow’s class. Our job is not to be talking
heads pontificating about the next 25 years, but to be engaged citizens,
thinking people, feeling human beings working every moment of the blessed time
granted to us on this fragile planet to be the change we want to see in the
world, right here, right now, with the children by our side."
