[Archive: From July, 2020]
Unless you’re a student, parent or teacher involved with making music in schools, you could be forgiven for missing an announcement on Monday which typified the increasing irrationality in the governmental response to Covid-19. It’s an irrationality driven by the need to be seen to be doing something, to be covering all bases and extending the arm of bureaucratic control beyond its normal remit, ostensibly to keep us all safe.
This latest iteration of government-knows-best comes as New South Wales Health last week released a confusing infographic declaring that ‘Wind Instruments should not be played near other people’. The graphic made reference to musicians needing to alter their activities, without any indication of whether those musicians included students, amateurs, or professionals. Further, there was no clarity as to what NSW Health considered a ‘Wind’ instrument (Saxophones, Clarinets, Flutes and Recorders, apparently, were in… presumably everything else was out?).
Unsurprisingly, scores of parents, teachers, students and school leaders reacted with bewilderment and demanded answers. More meetings were had, more advice was sought, and somewhat predictably, a once ‘safe’ activity - school band and orchestra rehearsal - was reclassified as ‘unsafe’. The edict was delivered on Monday morning by way of a blanket ban on all choirs, and bands in New South Wales government schools. Independent schools, knowing full well the dangers of pariah status, have quickly followed suit in shutting down their group musical activities.
This has occurred despite there being no research which conclusively links Wind and Brass playing (the instrument types used in school bands) to a significantly increased risk of Covid-19 transmission. There is also no record of a transmission event linked to Wind and Brass playing in a school or professional setting, either in Australia or overseas. Despite this, Secretary of the NSW Department of Education, Mark Scott claimed yesterday that the Government’s decision had been informed by incidences overseas of virus-spread from Wind instruments. Music teachers, well across the research, and with their livelihoods at stake, are understandably anxious to know where the department has sourced it’s information.
Regardless of that information being forthcoming, a heightened risk from the playing of school band instruments is not likely to be any greater than that posed by scores of other mundane, everyday activities currently undertaken by school children. Further, the Government and the public alike know that schools, community clubs and professionals engaging in competitive sport are exposing us all to a higher risk of virus transmission, but have adjudicated, correctly, that it is worth us taking those risks, to avoid the social and economic costs of a shutdown.
Despite these glaring inconsistencies, we now have a situation where a child in Sydney today is prohibited from sitting silently in a room listening to a teacher’s instructions, playing their instrument alongside the same peers they go to school with every day. Yet on the weekend, they will be encouraged to board busses and criss-cross the suburbs to play contact sport with groups of students from other schools. Their parents and grandparents, exponentially more susceptible to both the virus’ transmission and it’s symptomatic impact, will then socialise at Pubs and Clubs across our mercifully undivided city. They’ll exchange stories and spittle across tables, and indeed across post-codes, age-ranges, and myriad other demographic spectra.
Whilst they’re visiting those Pubs, They might also run the eponymous test on this latest, most ridiculous bureaucratic overreach. The result? ...A fail with flying colours, of course.
The outlawing of music ensembles is not the only inconsistency in the response to Covid-19. The educational landscape is growing cluttered with an eye-watering number of recommendations concerning what schools should and shouldn’t do to keep the community safe. Despite every teacher’s best intentions, benefits gained from taking recommended precautions are often and inevitably voided, given the impracticalities of consistently implementing social distancing within schools.
These inconsistencies are happening because an under-pressure bureaucracy has given in to a creeping temptation to take common sense decision-making power away from those at the coalface of social, educational and economic activity. This is being further perpetuated by a media paradigm of fear and shame that school leaders must precariously navigate, dare they cut a path slightly stray of the blanket directives spat out by Government agencies. God forbid the principal of a school who adjudicates that it might be safer for 40 students to rehearse a Mozart Symphony in a large hall than to sit shoulder-to-shoulder in a classroom where social distancing isn’t possible!
Unfortunately, Music Education doesn’t benefit from the trickle-down capital of it’s professional sphere like it’s wealthier classmate, School Sport does. The same urgency hasn’t gripped the arts world, in the way that the relentless push to reboot elite sport has fuelled a welcome embrace of school and community sport in the Covid era, with full acceptance of the risks involved. Have we fully questioned why Stadiums are reopening whilst Concert Halls remain silent? Or why a teenager’s weekly music practice is such low-hanging fruit that we can discard it one day, but allow them to run head first, covered in bodily fluids into a group of strangers the next?
On their knees financially and with morale at a shocking low, Australia’s musicians know there is already a severe tide of pain and professional adjustment coming in for them, before they even begin to worry about any damage done to their next generation. Just as there is no Peter V’Landys punching ruthlessly for the survival of the adults of the arts world, there is also no overwhelming lobbying force for the tens of thousands of music students who now face another debilitating disruption to their education.
Undoubtedly, there are jurisdictions where terrible circumstances mandate reasonable restrictions. It would be hard to make the case for a community choir of elderly Victorians rehearsing this side of Christmas. Similarly, as our beloved Opera House casts a shadow of silence over Circular Quay, the music-loving public will accept that 2000 patrons packing-in for Puccini is simply not the tonic for the times. However, tearing up our children’s music education on scant evidence of real or potential harm to the community is a bridge too far. It is a lazy response which risks inflicting long-standing damage to Australia’s fragile musical ecosystem.
Our country is slowly awakening to the reality that our society and economy is built not on transactions, but on complex relationships which won’t simply flick to ‘on’ after a period of disconnection. Our Arts and Education sectors will face a postponed reckoning of lower attendance rates, depressed activity and dramatically poorer outcomes for students who can’t simply just bounce back in better times. It is a test incumbent upon every decision-making body to make sure not a single educational activity is curtailed unless absolutely necessary. When it comes to music in New South Wales’ schools, that test has been failed.
Benjamin Crocker
17/7/2020
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Ben Crocker is a Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation Postgraduate Scholar in Washington DC, reading Politics, History & Philosophy in the great books program at St John’s College, Annapolis. In Australia, he has taught at The King’s School and The University of Sydney.