Mostly for teachers – but parents can answer it too?
Do schools still teach folk music to kids in the lower grades like they used to? Every time I mention folk music in any of my classes, I get a blank look from everyone – and these are university students!! By folk music, I mean songs like “The Erie Canal,” “John Henry” “Sweet Betsy From Pike” and so on, not Bob Dylan folk songs and others from the folk boom of the late 1950′s, early 1960′s, but authentic music from the days when the country was young and struggling. Or is that a thing of the past and the concentration has to be more on standardized testing with less time for learning about the nation’s musical heritage?
They don’t (My step-children in their late 20s never learned any; my 12-year-olds aren’t learning any either.). And I think that’s a tragedy.
They also don’t learn patriotic songs, not even The National Anthem, let alone songs like “America the Beautiful.”
This is a HUGE part of our common culture that public schools (which means “we the public”!) are allowing to disappear. I don’t know the reason, either. My guess would be a lot of forces converging to create this mess:
a) Art and music have been cut back in schools for financial reasons [but couldn’t the classroom teacher do this herself/himself? Teach the kids to sing with a background CD, or at least play these songs while the kids are working on something else.].
b) For a long while, patriotism was considered jingoistic. And even traditional folk music is, I think, patriotic, since it extols the history of our country.
c) Even now, patriotism has strangely become mixed up with politics, so putting it back in schools is difficult.
d) Even the Pledge of Allegiance was taken out of public schools. I’ve taught since 1974, and it was only around 1993 (?) that the Pledge appeared at school for the first time in my teaching career!
e) And yes, the current standardized testing pressure takes even more time out of the classroom teacher’s hands. Thus music and art have tumbled even lower in “importance.”
I wish I had the answer to this . . .
Bob Pike sharing the secrets of the ‘rope trick’
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