The aim of this paper is to investigate the understandings of ‘quality’, found in on-going political debate and educational reforms around the world, and to discuss the implications of such meanings for music education.
The quality of education is currently considered to be a concern of the highest political priority. To measure quality, exams and grades are being accredited with a more important role and the demands for reporting and controlling results are increasing. In other words, to improve quality in education the idea is to apply quality control and assurance through quantitative measurements. Furthermore, in the discourse of education quality concepts like ‘effectiveness’, ‘efficiency’ and ‘competitiveness’ are frequently recurring.
Throughout the last decades the meanings of quality has shifted from being a dynamic concept related to education quality, to a concept referring to properties linked to the fields of production, policy-making and marketing. This way of thinking indicates a confusion of two opposing concepts. While the original, philosophical meaning of quality (lat. qualitas) – ‘character’ and ‘disposition’ – deals with questions like ‘what kind?’, quantity deals with questions such as ‘how much?’. The impact of this shift has been significant and today quality is e.g. subject to a number of goals already formulated.
Moreover, notions of education quality necessarily imply educational values. The question is how an instrumental understanding of quality influences the essentially human and interpersonal activity of (music) education. These problems relate to challenges that are faced by music education and music teachers. The specific challenges vary from country to country, according to their different educational systems and conditions. However, there are generic and fundamental music educational challenges that are common to most countries. These will be discussed in this paper.