On pluralism, inclusion, and musical citizenship

In an age of international wealth insecurity, countries around the world are putting increasing pressure on public schools to prepare young people to compete in the new global marketplace. Using quantifiable measures as indictors of societal well-being, a kind of PISA panic has resulted, in which discourses of crisis have replaced long held beliefs about the purpose of education and public schooling. In this climate, we have forgotten the language we once used that linked education to values broader and richer than economic competitiveness alone. What if educators reconnected the idea of public schooling to citizenship and personal well-being? Music education is particularly well-suited to cultivate citizenship, defined in this article as a cooperative engagement between teachers and students, where sites of learning are communal, public-spirited, experimental, historically engaged, socially responsible, multicultural, and forward-looking. Using philosophical method to examine a notion of musical citizenship, the author shares a series of observations and analyses that link this call to conflicting facets of multicultural life in North America and Northern Europe. James Bank’s conception of multicultural education may serve as a guide to the difficult, painful, but mutually enriching process of reconnecting education, especially music education, to citizenship and the public good. Keywords: multicultural music education, citizenship, inclusion, democrac