This year, one percent of all A-Level students completed a full course in Music. This compares with 5.4 per cent doing Arts and Design and 1.6 per cent doing Drama. Before one can blame Michael Gove, this proportion has been in decline since 2008. Music seems to be everywhere - yet so few people wish to study it.
All sorts of explanations have been proposed - from the whims of the Russell Group to teenagers who are more interested in selecting subjects for economic gain rather than study for its own sake. There may be some truth in these reasons to varying degrees. It would be heretical to think that an advocate for arts education could turn out to be its own worst enemy. Somehow that suspicion got stronger.
Ken Robinson is not so much a phenomenon as a brand. The 27 million hits for his TED talk attest to this fact. The cult of Ken seems impervious to any legitimate criticism. If we were looking for scrutiny The Educators was more Desert Island Discs than The Life Scientific. We got Mr Robinson visiting his old school remembering the teachers who saw something in him. There was an allusion to multiple intelligence - an idea which seem well-intentioned but have a shaky evidence base. Two ideas however seem to permeate his thinking that lead to an insurmountable chasm to what he wants to achieve.
Firstly Robinson believes that a hierarchy within the arts is a bad thing. Within any school curriculum there are a limited number of hours that can be devoted to various subjects. History, modern foreign languages, sex education - all these subjects compete for time in a school timetable. The problems teachers face in deciding the number of hours to allocate to different subjects are unenviable. Ultimately it is getting the balance correct between developing the talents of pupils and fixing their weaknesses.
To say that dance should have the same number of hours as maths is a typical Robinson provocation. To say why dance is as important as music is a baby step too far for Robinson to explain. It is arguable that music is more fundamental than dance because without music there would be no dance - only mime.
Robinson's assertion that 'everybody dances' has a second idea embedded within it - if something is natural it is therefore good and must be encouraged. The philistine comments on calculus are unworthy of a professor of education (although Jennifer Ouellette and a host of other authors should be required reading for anyone who fails to see the relevance of maths in everyday life). The performing arts however are not as natural as Robinson would like to think. If you want someone to be able to read and write music, they need deliberate and explicit instruction in music notation. They need to know time signatures, key signatures, modes and a paraphernalia of other tools. This is not a natural skill. Music notation has been around for a much shorter period of time than the written word and so, to paraphrase Steven Pinker, it is a technology that has developed far too recently for any species-wide knack to evolve.
It is this failure to acknowledge that certain things we value are not natural that leads Robinson to propose equal hours for all subjects. It fails to acknowledge individual differences in abilities and preferences. How would he deal, for example, with the student who loves music but hates dance?
Why does this matter for the arts in schools? It matters because if we want to see more students pursuing the arts as both an academic and practical pursuit, the arguments have to be a lot stronger and rely more on the arts and their intrinsic worth. Robinson's showmanship and cavalier attitude towards evidence leads to arts advocates relying on faulty memes such as 7 per cent of communication being verbal. To reverse the decline in music let's stop being so apologetic about the unnatural nature of the art.
