Learning from the Past

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Submitted by cchater(5)22 February, 2009 - 15:00

By Chris Chater, American School of Paris

 

Celestial Monchord from http://www.celestialmonochord.org/log/images/celestial_monochord.jpgIn the days of the Ptolemaic universe life for teachers was a lot simpler. For a start you were not concerned with learning differences, left or right brained, visual or auditory. Everything out there was in tune and if it wasn't you just cut it out. Curriculum and continuum were much easier to follow and didn't have to be mapped more than once.
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Seeing things differently carried a price - being left-handed for instance - and musicians usually learned to play the 'right' way. Ten years ago Chris Seed had his left-handed piano custom-built. It doesn't seem to have caught on much.
 
Need Piano Lessons? http://www.get-piano-lessons.com/images/piano.lessons.homepage.jpg
 
Looking at this strangely colored keyboard I wonder why we so resolutely stuck to black and white keys all these centuries. Harp strings after all are color coded.

 

Technology has left us with some amazing inventions from the cat piano to the curved keyboard - as with the typewriter layout, much of our legacy items are a relic of earlier beliefs systems. Our present flats and sharps owe their existence to the fear of the 'devil's interval' when simple harmonies are added to the basic scale tones. However they did sing in parallel fifths in those days whereas now these intervals are shunned by scholars (though metal guitarists brought them back into fashion in the 'sixties).

 

At school we recently acquired a digital harpsichord that allows us to perform early music using tuning systems that were standard in that era. It's amazing how we have fooled ourselves into believing the modern keyboard is 'in tune'. No wonder oriental musicians shudder when they hear our Western music that is built on inharmonic frequencies.

 
The way we learn in schools is sometimes mirrored by the beliefs we have held over the centuries. Right now I am disturbed by the insistence on linear pedagogy that culminates with a test score where our young learners are inspected, selected or rejected. What if we rely on those scores for our teaching strategies and continue to prepare students for a Medieval future? What if rainbows really turn out to be straight, not curved? As my report cards lurk in the very near future I wonder how many judgments will prove me totally wrong later. How will we teachers live up to the final SAT they call the Last Judgment?

Chris Chater is the Education Web Coordinator at the American School of Paris

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