Where Do We Go From Here?

We are in the midst of revolution. The world is changing so rapidly that although we think we see the world around us, the world is changing right before our eyes... right now. A serious question faces us as educators. How relevant is the past? Do we cling to the past because it created us as we are? Does this past image (and sound) of ourselves prevent us from seeing and hearing ourselves in the immediacy of the present?

Marshall McLuhan predicted this paradigmatic shift in the 1970s and the media revolution has succeeded in transforming the culture and moving us away from a culture of point to a culture of media, creating what he described as the "global village," as he proclaimed "the medium is the message."



When we examine what constitutes the materials and ideas we try to communicate to our students, we are confronted by the challenge that we must learn the past before we advance further. In fact,the past has controlled our curriculum. You must know the history of yourself or you are doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over.

Yet a new paradigm has emerged that challenges us to create the future--- not from the past but from the energy of newness and discovery. A new creature has evolved. Generations are separated by an evolutionary process that separates young and old. This has always been true, but Time is so accelerated that the separations are more distant and defined.

Yet consciousness transcends these barriers and situates the moment as the fullness of awareness and experience. Education becomes a term, perhaps antiquated and captured by the past. Education is replaced by conscious awareness that spontaneously knows and understands in an unending kaleidoscope of discovery. The Past and the Future are consumed in the fullness of knowing at the point of discovery.

In some ways, the new technologies empower us to know the world in the presence of now. We can see ourselves, imagine ourselves, and transform ourselves in the media of conscious awareness. Does anything exist without our awareness of it?

Technology as an Extension of Ourselves

Technology serves to extend the range of human expression and achievement. Because of this, music has always been intimately associated with the development of technology. Instruments emerged as the technological extension of the human voice, and as instruments developed, they extended the range and demands made upon vocal music. This reciprocal exchange is described by Marshall McLuhan as the synergistic overlap that occurs when new media absorb the content of old media and then develop their own idiosyncratic features. Just as 19th Century music might be described in the context of the industrial revolution and the machine age, the 20th and 21st Century are indelibly stamped with the rise of technology and media as defining elements for our time.

For those of us in music and arts education, there are some key figures who have influenced our thinking: John Dewey for his philosophical stance which insisted in Art as Experience that students must engage the arts through direct involvement and not necessarily through appreciation or analysis, per se; Jerome Bruner for his innovative ideas toward a strategy for teaching which included cyclical curricula and constructivism; Howard Gardner whose theory of multiple intelligences caused us to re-examine the assumptions we have used with regard to teaching and learning; Elliot Eisner who has helped us understand art as knowledge and what education can learn from the arts; and Marshall McLuhan who has described the ecological environment of media that shape our thoughts, our experience, and how and what we learn.



There are many prophets for this Age of Technology as it is rapidly morphing into the Age of Media. We are also morphing (evolving) into a new creature with miniature devices connecting us with the world, changing and defining who we are in relationship to the world and its events and to those around us and those who are distant and unfamiliar, and less and less anonymous. Now in 2009 Obama is proposing that we each are to be embedded with a digital implant to track our universal healthcare as part of his stimulus package.

We are now becoming the medium, we are the world and its message and massage.