Falsifying Music Education: Surrealism, Curriculum, and the Incoherence of Order

Falsifying (Music) Education: Surrealism and Curriculum

What would schooling look like if we aimed not for success but for something deliberately unreasonable, disreputable, and perhaps impossible? This is not an exercise in futility, but rather an attempt to map the edges of educational ambition. By observing what schooling is rarely permitted to be—though it might be—we can better understand what it actually is. Schooling, in this case, serves as the backdrop for music education.

A faint hope persists that some "hole-in-the-wall-gangs" of lawless arts educators and music teachers may still keep these ideas alive: not as a fully realised practice, but as a leaning, a tendency in thought. The core of the argument is simple: order in schooling is a deception, and exposing that deception demands the kind of iconoclasm that curriculum can embrace. Falsification is the interruption of a fixed sequence by a discrepant event. It saves us from the deceptions of repetition, from mistaking sequence for true order.

The Incoherence of Order: Claims Against Fortune

Social beings crave predictability. We seek out sequences that prove order exists. We no longer fear the sun might rise in the west, but we still worry about losing our jobs, destabilising the environment, or failing to contain pandemics—and we still seek to resolve musical tension. A D flat in the key of C is a discrepant event that threatens order. We either accept it as an atonal shock, reconcile ourselves to temporary chaos, or reassert order by "diminishing" it.

To rely on these repeated proofs is to make a claim against fortune—a wager that history will not undo our predictions, which are essential for existential stability. Our institutions operate as another kind of claim against fortune, a declaration that we can channel social forces and stamp our values onto the future. But a falsifying moment inevitably arrives: when institutions fail, when Hobbesian anarchy breaks out, and the hypothesis of society is disproven. Widespread child abuse is one such feared falsification. If the absence of self-restraint is as pervasive as reports suggest, the social contract is voided, and the hypothesis that we can live together through mutual restraint collapses. The order of institutions is not a fixed truth but a bid for one—and it is never owned.

Schooling powered by "official knowledge"—a national curriculum or criteria imposed from outside—is exactly such a bid. Funding a school system that promotes a stable, decontextualised knowledge base is an act of self-determination by society, staking a prediction that its values will be reproduced. It is a claim to confidence, a projection of power by tribal elders preserving cultural traditions. As long as schools survive and reproduce the values of achievement, the sequence continues, turning anxiety into expectation. Schools live on the edge of chaos, yet their institutional cladding perpetually saves them.

But other models exist. Some schools design their curriculum to encourage students and teachers to ponder alternative futures, to interrupt cultural patterns of belief and action. These schools are rare today, though they once thrived during the era of school-based curriculum development. One prominent example, Summerhill, survives but was recently threatened with closure by government inspectors, in part because its iconic status as a democratic school attracted hostile attention from the Chief Inspector of Schools. At Summerhill, lessons are voluntary and only occasionally attended; pupils educate one another and yet score at average levels on national exams. The school has never been preoccupied with teaching, achievement, or transmitting adult values. Instead, it focuses on creating environments where young people discover their own futures and actively challenge authority. Summerhill is a discrepant event, an interruption in the comfortable sequence of state schooling—a falsification of the idea that knowledge can remain stable and anchor cultural reproduction, that it can be transferred rather than generated, that it can be divorced from experience.

As a falsification, Summerhill offers no alternative truths of its own—it simply denies unwarranted truths to state schooling. It reminds us that educational journeys cannot be assumed to have end states. Falsifiers are not obliged to assert alternatives; their role is to remind us that all educational generalisations "decay" (as Cronbach put it in 1975)—they are unstable across time and space—and that continuous hypothesis testing is the highest aspiration curriculum can manage. Summerhill remains one of the few ongoing experiments in schooling.

We might call Summerhill a "grande falsification": a challenge to order at the institutional level. Music education does not exist in an institutional vacuum. The possibilities for "petits falsifications"—transformative experiences at the individual or pedagogical level—are constrained by what the institution tolerates. Summerhill places little emphasis on arts or music lessons, because creativity there is not found in subject disciplines or teaching. (A. S. Neill was dismissive of teaching anyway.) Creativity at that school stems from ways of being and associating; the school itself is the creative curriculum.

Nevertheless, I want to concentrate on the "petit falsifications." What does music education look like through this lens? What chances exist for challenging official knowledge, for promoting what might be genuinely transformative, surprising, and disreputable within classrooms? Where is the curriculum equivalent of a D flat in a C major chord, or the sun rising in the West?

The Incoherence of Order: Ostinatos and Variants

Winnie, a former student of mine, wrote a case study for her Masters thesis that recorded interactions with a group of performance artists called Goat Island. She used fragmented narratives and reflections alive with chaos—one event after another. She told our study group that you have to open your mind to the disorder of consecutive "variants"; creativity and tolerating this chaos were somehow interconnected. Yet as cognitive beings we cannot help noticing and hunting for patterns. Each variant offers a new discrepant possibility and also the chance of repetition. Eventually we notice or fabricate a pattern from the sequence. In music, this becomes an ostinato—a repeated figure whose job is to provide stable background. We shift it to the cognitive background and give it second-order attention, keeping our sharpest focus on fresh variants in the foreground. Variants are serial discrepant events—potential falsifications—that force us to reexamine patterns, verify or update them.

Musically, variants supply tension while the ostinato sets the tonal scene. Modern jazz players work from a harmonic centre; the challenge of improvisation is to deny compliance with the fixed harmonic pattern, roaming as far from the centre as possible while maintaining connection. This is a game between ostinato and variant, between head and heart. The improviser searches out variants and keeps the audience alert to shifting understandings of "home." Yet the daring travel away from that home is always paired with the need to return. Jazz improvisation, while expressive, is essentially conservative—it protects basic assumptions and underlying structures, resolving through rational processes. It offers the classic example of freedom within form. Resolutions serve as endpoint closures, essential for aesthetic satisfaction and performer showmanship, but they close avenues for learning. Ostinatos, once secure, are pushed to the background.

Closure is not an inevitable constraint on curriculum, though national curricula and parents who want a final performance certainly demand it. Classrooms are not performance venues, yet high-stakes testing regimes treat them as such. In England, children endure harsh year-end tests that prematurely limit their development. Many children stand in awkward compliance while adults applaud their private accomplishments. The real purpose is to showcase the teacher's effectiveness which is then aggregated into school performance and published in league tables. The implied "community" connects teachers across the table in a choral tradition reminiscent of Victorian England, where each village choir could be gathered into massive forces celebrating the nation. Classrooms become village choirs whose meaning comes from being pooled together—denying the local and intimate in favour of the national pattern.

This quixotic agenda distracts from the true educational purpose behind music education: to help young people build independent identities and independent judgement. When do we achieve closure on self-definition? If music education is to truly engage with young people's experience, we must start local, start intimate, begin with what counts as community in that specific place. Classrooms should become, in Stenhouse's (1975) model, laboratories for testing knowledge-hypotheses—not engines of output and achievement. We need fewer demonstrations and closures, more experiments and apertures. Fewer ostinatos, more variants.

The Incoherence of Order: Deceptive Patterns

Winnie wondered whether schools could cope with discrepant events. Variants, she believed, are the nodes of learning. But schools committed to official knowledge foreground the ostinato and push variants to the margins. They demand compliance with the sequence, value predictable knowledge-events over leaps into uncertain territory. Set tests and required performances serve as closure points; marks and credentials record learning lost; the pages of the National Curriculum define the boundary between schooling and authentic education.

Ordered classroom interactions are difficult spaces for engaging with variants. The National Curriculum for Music in England imposes an artificial structure. The ostinato dominates and dictates interactions while deprivileging some experiences over others. The curriculum builds on two assumptions: (a) movement from simple to complex, and (b) revisiting concepts at deeper levels—the famous spiral. This compels students to learn about pitch, rhythm, and sequence before anything else. Although this might suit some pupils and teachers, it excludes alternatives like beginning with the complex (for instance, a whole opera) and working backwards to its components. That second approach, constructive deconstruction, is popular among visiting musicians and in outreach projects (Kushner, 1988). But rigid adherence to oversimplified building blocks ignores children's differing understandings and imposes artificial reasoning, drawing them into false patterns.

Condition (b) encourages revisiting ideas at higher understanding levels, reinforcing the ostinato and the false logic. Through this process the English national curriculum binds all current interactions to a precedented scheme, overruling each local, particular moment's own premise in favor of a far-removed one. Adopting one logic denies others. The spiral model diminishes surprise and undermines the independence of each moment. Pattern is always favoured; variants are isolated and frowned upon; breaking the chain demands questioning the whole framework. Music specialists in English schools have largely vanished from teacher education. Those remaining are excluded from collaborative design, working alone as cottage industry or community music leaders. Pirate operations aside, hip-hop and rapping artists craft their own identifiers on the streets independent of institution.

The Incoherence of Order: Automatic Expression

The surrealists preached falsification as mission (Breton, 1948): trying to free younger performers from their elders' confining schools. "Surrealism was born from a limitless affirmation of faith in the genius of youth," whose novel approaches the older generation relegated as immature avoidance. Breton earlier wrote (in the first surrealist manifesto, 1971; originally 1924): "Perhaps childhood is the nearest state to true life." Surrealism aimed at iconoclasm against the fixed forms of parents and provocation—disrupting the foundational thoughts reproducing overarching culture. He and his generation determined to manifest by every medium the utter arbitrariness locking persons incapable of anything innovating action under trivialized awareness masquerading as rationality of pairs placed to imprison persons forever— madness/reason, dream/deed, inside/outside; and further to exceed universal bind, a mode of liberty they found in that "automatic action"—separating expression from cognition and logical sequence guiding insight.

Pure psychic automatism through which one intends to express, whether verbally or in writing, the actual functioning of thought. Thought dictated in the absence of any control exercised by reason, and free from all aesthetic or moral concerns.

Surrealism was also a pursuit of more genuine worlds than those available during the brief era between two world wars. Disgust with surface reality drove people toward more significant perceptions. What did the world of outward realities hide? How might the origins of its terrible distortions be properly perceived and corrected? The Surrealist project was an investigation into the hidden realms of formation and transformation—impossible without a Freudian lens; certainly fueled by the existential urge to collapse history and future into the personal present moment to intensify the search for meaning. From chaos emerges the longing for coherence. Long after Surrealism was founded and had its peak, André Breton reviewed its main proposals. They were, roughly paraphrased, these:

• Exploring unconscious life through “automatic expression” in order to grasp motivation.
• Using dialectics to reunite common opposites like madness/reason, dream/action, conceptual/physical—all of which I combine here into the underlying polarity of knowledge/action.
• Challenging the supposed conflict between nature and humanity, with their “two necessities presenting themselves as being in grave disaccord”—when they are better reconciled through recognizing and exploring ‘objective chance.’
• A dedication to “dramatic humour,” a releasing of the need to take seriously “the moments when the springs of life are stretched to the breaking point.”
• Raising the status of myth and re-entering the mythical territories of the id.

The Coherence of Disorder: (5) Iconoclasm and Curriculum

I propose these as the foundation for a music education curriculum—one that thrives on informed iconoclasm and properly respects the experience of young people. From these we can derive practical guides for action by teachers and students. The attack on rationalism, the effort to drive knowledge interactions directly from the resonances of experience, from the immediate sources of identity struggles, the shift of purpose from planned teaching to what is discovered internally—these characterize a pedagogical approach. If a curriculum goal is to support young people in building meaningful identities, then authentic pedagogy must be as much a site of conflict between adult and young person as it is a knowledge interface. What complicates this, of course, is that the pupil cannot avoid the obligation to join the school in its struggle to find social meaning. These struggles can be combined—they are different, not contradictory.

Striking the right balance between them, protecting the child’s right to autonomous meaning, is impossible under current conditions of state-sponsored chaos. The primacy of test-based accountability and forcing schools into market competition in England, with similar moves in the United States; the state-sponsored war on dissent involving firing teachers who reject official targets; empowering headteachers to fine parents; imprisoning parents of truant children; imposing curfew orders on young people that force them into

the homes from which they are often fleeing; devoting primary education to basic literacies and losing the creative arts entirely; explicit government intentions to deprofessionalize teaching—all of these combine to suppress creative, essential contests over meaning and truth between student and teacher, to strip pedagogy of risk and experiment. My curriculum proposal reflects that same flight from unreason, from the rubble of failed social policies in search of more authentic curriculum experience that holds together in young people’s lives—and is more humanistic. A precondition is freeing youth from “aesthetic or moral preoccupations” designed by adults. This also substitutes compliance with ‘the canon’ for exploring inner worlds, allows fascination with ‘objective chance’ and a renewed taste for automatic expression and unpredictability—a genuine rehearsal of the immediate rather than the past. These point to an enhanced role for the following dimensions of music experience:

• Improvisation.
• Critical deconstruction of complex musical experiences by examining the structures of their iconography (the fame of a composer, the aesthetic completeness of an octave, central concepts like resolution and recapitulation).
• A Reggio Emilia-type approach (child-centred pedagogy) where music projects emerge from students’ unpredictable and cumulative understanding.
• A Summerhill-type approach to collective theorizing where goals and standards are based on situated agreement, not determined by people ‘elsewhere.’
• A safe environment where inner feelings and judgements can be expressed without fear of retribution.
• Music ‘utterances’ are explored, rehearsed, and refined not as performance elements but as expressions of personality and personal struggle.
• The divorce, decree nisi, of music judgement from music appreciation, freeing students from the requirement to admire their elders’ accomplishments.
• The reintegration of music knowledge and music action so that legitimate knowledge and music theory are those generated and held in the same context where music is being made—i.e., students theorize about music by making it—a revaluing of the immediate.
• A ‘coherentist’ approach to curriculum order (Everitt & Fisher 1995) in which coherence is determined by criteria intrinsic to the music education experience rather than from ‘elsewhere.’

Music education suits such explorations for these reasons:

• It is marginal to the achievement agenda and thus more easily freed from political constraint.
• My own experience over 15-plus years of researching music education is that music is a pre-text, and the post-text to which it ultimately relates is life.

In my work, interviews with students, teachers, and musicians invariably start with music but rarely stay there and quickly give way to conversation about life and its concerns.

• Music is a prominent feature in adolescents’ struggle, especially, to discover appropriate identities.
• Music-making as an inquiry site is both rich and transparent, with key issues in the struggle for independence—such as ownership, authority, chance versus order, judgement, and control.

In practical terms, automatism finds expression in many areas of classroom and school life but is suppressed. Contemporary approaches to music curriculum in Britain restrict pedagogical creativity by demanding narrow curriculum logics such as movement from simple to complex, spiral approaches to curriculum, and suppression of student voice in music through performance restrictions. But variants are suppressed, not eliminated. There are more creative challenges available for music teachers to use pedagogy to explore cultural dissonances between adult and youngster, provoking musical expression that precedes understanding by both child and teacher, turning the pedagogical act into one of research and experimentation, seeking meaning on the young person’s terms. Automatic expression happens before and after lessons, in private cellars and lofts, in the daydreaming minds of present-but-truanting youngsters, and, of course, in playgrounds. More formal discussion-based classrooms become contexts for conceptual experimentation by students once the teacher grants license, and once the teacher submits to the logic of discussion driven by spontaneous expression. There is a pedagogical case for ‘talk before you think’—not letting convention, courtesy, or fear censor authentic expression. Much of Stenhouse’s logic was illuminated by the realization that any expression of preference or favour by the teacher is received by the pupil as an expression of authority—making it impossible to distinguish any pupil response as either compliance or choice. The only clearly authentic pupil voice, in these terms, is that of denial and challenge. Stenhouse’s answer to this conundrum was to drain away that form of authority in the teacher by defining their role as ‘neutral chair’—responsible for the quality and range of pupil views but not for where those views would lead the pupil. Learning outcomes meant little to Stenhouse except as warranted uncertainties. Once the teacher is freed from learning outcomes, they are free to engage with observation and understanding.

Assessment, too, is a construction site for authenticity—the instrument the teacher uses to come to terms with the student’s automatic expression. ‘Authentic assessment’ is spoken of as that form of teacher judgement that most closely relates to the nature of the learning task, supports and extends it, and is structured by its assumptions. But this often merely restates a pedagogical effectiveness argument and retains control over meaning in the teacher’s hands. Assessment, of course, is the key instrument for sustaining and warranting truth claims of schooling and thus becomes a target for informed iconoclasm. An authentic form of assessment in light of experiments with automatism is a process in which the teacher struggles to understand the student’s expression—perhaps by emitting judgements as hypotheses and self-testing instruments—‘what do you mean…?’, ‘could that be…?’, ‘how might we go about…?’, ‘if that for you, then what for me…’. The teacher is an anthropologist at home.

The need is to see pedagogy not as a communicative device or as an instrument of ethical agreement between child and teacher, but as a site of creative tension derived from the inevitable cultural conflict between them. The implication of this conflict is that the pedagogical challenge comes not from curriculum advocates who must be appeased (educational administrators, political communities, parent groups) but from children who must be understood. I see no curriculum area that would not benefit from automatism, though there are some—the arts and humanities—where it is most suitable. The study of the human condition is where learning must be founded upon self-revelation. It is in the study of the human condition and the self that the child is most at risk from the intervening authority of the pedagogue and, hence, where the teacher needs liberating from appeasement expectations.

Cox et al. (1999) explore a surrealist approach to the art curriculum through an iconoclastic denial of the rational. Their starting point is Robert Rauschenberg’s 1953 event when he appropriated a de Kooning drawing by erasing it—the dismissal of the image being at the same time an independent declaration of ownership. The curriculum message here was that the reasoned rejection by the pupil of their elders’ work was the only unequivocal sign of independent thought. Remove the presupposition of the image and the ground is cleared for the child’s free expression.

What surrealist automatism as a pedagogical technique and Stenhouse’s neutral chair have in common is a transfer of authority over knowledge from teacher to pupil, an essential exposure of the teacher to the child’s autonomous purpose—and a resulting intensification of the complexity of teaching. With that transfer of authority comes an immediate challenge to ‘the canon,’ to warranted ways of doing things.

For all but a few, there is a tension between the musical canon and music improvisation. Learn to master ‘playing by the dots’ and all but those few are virtually incapacitated in constructing music as they go along—they have been inducted into a relationship of dependency. I take this as a general case of a frailty arising from the relationship between cognition and emotion—this business of how discipline displaces volition. But it is surely there in the defensive armoury of older generations against the younger. ‘Learn the canon! Earn your right to dissent!’ But apart from the concealed emasculation of autonomous judgement, we might be cautious rather than assuming about our injunction to youth to ‘know that which you seek to overthrow.’ The ‘knowing’ will not always be the neutral, honorific process implicit in our moral vocabulary; knowing has a backwash effect—sometimes we may substitute ‘co-option’ for ‘knowledge.’ Blind but purposeful iconoclasm is an alternative curriculum strategy. First know yourself, then confront the canon—that way, at least, you might have developed some armour of your own. That, too, is an educational application of automatism and a practical approach to falsification.

Fanciful, perhaps. Too demanding, maybe, of a profession and system that so stolidly defends itself against radical experiment and anti-authoritarianism. Perhaps automatism stands only as what one reviewer of a draft of this paper worried it might remain—‘a dreamy surprise island,’ too distant, too exotic for hope of a landing.

But a question remains. Where is the pedagogy of resistance?

Where is the educational response to the chaos that has become schooling—a chaos no longer solely attributable to those hardy old enemies, class and injustice, but which emanates from a politically unassailable technocracy uniting the right and the left?

By resistance I don’t mean countervailing ideology, using the classroom as a site of class struggle or as a site for denouncing social inequality. These, in my terms, pre-empt the expression and analysis of the student who, as a student, has the right even to become a troublesome technocrat. It is not the teacher’s business to be concerned with learning outcomes; these are properly the concerns of the students, their peers, and families. The pedagogy of resistance is pedagogy that protects classrooms as laboratories, denies the imposition of learning goals, admits into judgement only criteria derived from existential realities in the classroom, and creates the conditions for the unfettered exploration and expression of the student’s inner view. To resist, it is sufficient not to engage.

I see little of this resistance, though I see many teachers overwhelmed with struggle—often to justify what they are required to do, which is sometimes a dry fruit from which to squeeze professional meaning. Classroom experimentation is at low ebb and mostly limited to fine-tuning the engine of ‘curriculum delivery’ and the grinding machine of student achievement and classroom control—‘what works’ rules the day. The change agenda is dominated by what Schön (1971) characterized as “dynamic conservatism”—for example, school ‘improvement’ rather than curriculum innovation. But then, the forces of control are strong.

Control is the technocrat’s response to the threat of creativity. Automatism is a way of bringing adult authority into question for its shortcomings in offering identity models to young people. Automatism moves beyond what is known and prescribed to explore not just the student’s obligation to enter into the school’s struggle to disseminate meaning, but the school’s obligation to enter into the student’s struggle for identity.

Acknowledgement

The author acknowledges the support and encouragement of Bob Stake in developing this article.

References

Apple, M. (1993). Official knowledge: Democratic education in a conservative age. London: Routledge.

Bernstein, B. B. (1970). A critique of the concept of compensatory education. In D. Rubinstein & C. Stoneman (Eds.), Education for democracy. London: Penguin.

Breton, A. (1948). The situation of surrealism between the two wars. Yale French Studies, 2, 67-78.

Breton, A. (1971). Le manifeste du surréalisme. In P. Waldberg, Surrealism (pp. 66-75). New York: McGraw-Hill. (Original work published 1924)

Cox, G., Hollands, H., & de Rijke, V. (Eds.). (1999). The impossibility of art education. London: Cameraworks.

Kushner, S. (1988). Musicians go to school: A case of knowledge and control and cross-professional action. American Educational Research Journal, 28(2), 275-296.

Schön, D. (1971). Beyond the stable state. London: Temple Smith.

Stenhouse, L. (1975). An introduction to curriculum research and development. London: Heinemann.

Stenhouse, L. (1967). Culture and education. London: Nelson.

Author

SAVILLE KUSHNER is Professor in the School of Education and Director of the Centre for Research and Democracy at the University of West England.