Rethinking Music Education and Social Change

Book excerpt: The arts, and particularly music, are well-known agents for social change. They can empower, transform, or question. They can be a mirror of society's current state and a means of transformation. They are often the last refuge when all attempts at social change have failed. But are the arts able to live up to these expectations? Can music education cause social change? Rethinking Music Education and Social Change offers timely answers to these questions. It presents an imaginative, yet critical approach. At once optimistic and realistic, the book asseses music education's relation to social change and offers a new vision for music education as utopian theory and practice. As an important topic in sociology and political science, utopia offers a new tradition of thinking and a scholarly foundation for music education's relation to social change.