music education, curriculum, rationale, technology, wellbeing,
To say that the world has undergone enormous transformation in the past twenty years is a truism. On a global level, we have seen a host of changes from social, cultural, scientific and technological perspectives made manifest in for example, the patterns of life expectancy, breakthroughs in medicine, the migration of peoples and in the explosion of tools for communication. Here the bounds of possibility confound us on every turn, from instant messaging to studying images from the edge of our galaxy--and beyond. Closer to home, we can observe changes in the life world of the child, the pressures of school reform, developments in teacher education, the impact of economic and policy perspectives, as well as the ubiquity of technology in all kinds of learning contexts. Yet, some aspects of education - including music education - remain constant: we still look to ancient philosophers such as Socrates to guide our questioning, and to Aristotle to guide our judgements. More recent education thinkers such as Dewey, Vygotsky, Piaget and Bruner are still enormously relevant, whilst in music education, we are still trying to wend our way through the guidance offered by the ‘school music’ educators, such as Kodály and Orff, as well as a host of music education philosophers with origins much earlier in the 20th century. And is the learning of musicianship not the same as ever? Cognisant of this stability-instability dichotomy, this paper revisits the rationale for primary music as expressed in the Irish Primary Curriculum documents of 18-20 years ago, and proposes a number of fresh starting points in considering a contemporary rationale for music education in the primary school - a place where music competes for attention alongside fidget spinners, flipagrams and sport of all kinds.