School music education in Australia is in crisis, according to The National Review of Music Education (2005). Most children have little or no access to quality music teaching. And nothing is being done about it. Why is this, when we have overwhelming evidence of how music-making enhances the core disciplines of mathematics, languages and a mastery of English? In music teaching you get what you can afford. A few, mostly private, schools are centres of musical excellence, the majority offer little beyond recordings of popular music. Primary schools fare the worst: 80% have no trained music teacher on staff. The knock-on effect in secondary schools is clear.

Meanwhile, children are ‘educating’ themselves through their iPod, internet, and mobile phone. Few learn to play an instrument or to sing properly. The root causes, writes Walker, lie in the paucity of specialist teachers and disdain of the classical music tradition. He calls on Minister Guillard urgently to address the recommendations of their National Review; the alternative is a nation of passive consumers with no conception of music as a profound art.

Dr Robert Walker has spent a lifetime in music education on three continents. He held two Chairs in music education in Canada before coming to Australia and is the author of eight books and many research papers. He was Chief Examiner for Music for the International Baccalaureate 1987–1993, and Chair of the Research Commission of the International Society for Music Education 1998–2000.

Read the first three pages