The Cost of Blind Obedience

As I often write about, kids quit piano for one main reason:

It's unlike any other learning they do in school. And they can't figure out how to handle it.

Mainstream education is still done the way it was decades ago. Put a bunch of kids in a room with a teacher. Give them information. Give them a test to assess their knowledge. Move on to the next unit.

Retention and application beyond test day doesn't matter.

And if anyone falls out of line, there's hell to pay. 

Music is entirely different. Music is complex. It's impossible for a teacher to tell a student exactly what to do at home. There are too many possible challenges or variables in the six days between lessons.

Nevertheless, in my early teaching days, I tried to do this out of desperation. I would literally send a student a list of steps that looked something like this:

1. Play mm 1-4 three times in a row with no mistakes.
2. Play mm. 5-8 three times in a row with no mistakes.
3. Play mm. 1-8 three times in a row with no mistakes.
4. Play mm. 9-12 three times in a row with no mistakes.
(continued for 25+ more steps)

This didn't last long. There are only so many hours in a piano teacher's day, after all. Plus, this still didn't fix the issues.

How could I list what to do when a student had a problem I didn't anticipate? Or when a student would start zoning out and just trash through the music?

I stopped doing this when I concluded that students must learn this skill for themselves. By trying to outline every minuscule step, I was shortchanging their learning.

I was trying to be too much like school.

Because I knew, as soon as my crutch-like instructions were gone, they would be clueless.

Which brings up one of the dangers of traditional education.

Blind obedience.

Only being able to learn with an instruction manual. Being clueless what to do when the variables change. And worse yet, simply awaiting orders what to do. School doesn't mean to, but it trains us to do this.

COVID brought this to light all too well. It was as though in the course of a few months, we forgot how viruses work. We were waiting for the CDC and the government to tell us what to do.

We were told masks wouldn't be helpful, so a lot of people didn't wear masks.

Then we were told masks were helpful, so a lot of people wore them.

Then when the numbers were down, masks were helpful but not required.

Then, when vaccines were rolling out, we were told that masks weren't necessary if you were vaccinated. Except you might still spread it. But then, you might still get it.

I'm not ragging on the CDC. But, in the laundry list of orders and instructions, critical thinking was lost. Even common sense was lost.

Even though the rules of viruses and disease hadn't changed, we were stuck awaiting instructions.

When we could have been problem solving and thinking creatively instead.