Views of Spain: The town band

@FreddieUK There is little incentive to play musical instruments in English Secondary school. They claim to be too expensive. The Spanish raise the funds.

I’ve heard bands play at Religious festivals, including Easter at Serville, not nothing of this standard. I once witnessed a bullfight, the musical was appalling, so was the event.

@peterlee Yes, there's lots of music in churches in the UK of a wide variety. I too lament the demise of music making (as opposed to academic study of it) in schools, but the utilitarians have held sway for 20 years or so. I sense signs of positive movement in that regard.

@FreddieUK Rebuilding community spirit after covid is difficult in England.

@peterlee It does seem to be, yes, because people became too used to finding their own interests and entertainments. I am hopeful the community spirit will return, slowly perhaps, but still return.

@peterlee Same in Norway, pretty much every school or village has a brass band. They raise money by running a loppemarked (flea market) once or twice a year.

@peterlee I don't think you can blame COVID for it. COVID might have made it worse but community spirit has been in decline in England for quite a while. An ex-colleague of mine moved from Norway to the south of England many years ago and after a while he tried to organize people in the street of terraced houses he lived in to tidy up the street, pick up litter, etc. He knocked on every door in the street and was turned down at every one. He still goes out and picks up litter by himself. I usually have a plastic carrier bag in my handbag so that when I go for a walk I can pick up discarded drinks cans and so on.

@ninalanyon I live on the coast and there are a few voluntary beach-cleaning groups active in the area.

Not so much for litter-picking in the streets and parks, though a few individuals take it on themselves to do that. I pick up the items of litter just outside my home and put them in my rubbish-bin; but must admit not being an unpaid street-cleaner.

Perhaps we are all worn down by too many wilfully antisocial cowards: fly-tippers, litter-throwers, pavement cyclists, vandals including paint-sprayers, and the like.

I do not claim to understand why they are so. They are not born antisocial, but choose to be. They are not born vandals, litter-throwers, graffiti-sprayers, dangerous and illegal cyclists - they choose to be. They are not born to be cowards - they choose to be.

@ArishMell I suspect that they grow up surrounded by like minded people. Our early conditioning is a very strong influence on our later behaviour. It's not only money and hair colour that are heritable and not only genes that transmit from generation to generation.

@ninalanyon A good point. I do wonder about their elders and supposedly betters.

@ninalanyon There has been a different atmosphere in the UK since COVID.

What I saw yesterday was pretty wonderful. There was a real community and family atmosphere. What is there in the UK? Supermarkets full at weekends. What sort of culture is that?

@peterlee But back in the early 1970s when I was in senior high school (in southern England) we had a school orchestra. Granted it wasn't on the same scale as a professional symphony orchestra but it had all the same components.

Is the UK poorer now than it was fifty five years ago?

@ninalanyon Politicians are poorer in their understanding of what rounded education is and they have squeezed music education, along with the other arts, to the point where they are very marginalised in the school timetable. Hence my description of the curriculum earlier on as being 'utilitarian'.

@FreddieUK But we did the utilitarian ones as well. We didn't do music instead of maths or pottery instead of PE or art instead of algebra or stage productions instead of statistics, we did all of them. We put on full scale productions of The Pirates of Penzance, Pygmalion, theatre in the round productions of Antigone, etc. at Christmas. And I don't just mean for internal consumption, they typically ran for at least three nights with a paying audience.

The educational value of putting on something like a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera is hard to overstate; there is something for everyone to do: stage lighting for the technically inclined, costume making for those who can operate a sewing machine, painting the flats for those who enjoy painting, someone has to do the make up, someone else organize the wardrobe and changes, and of course anyone who can sing or speak the lines, plus of course the aforementioned orchestra.

Everyone involved learns a tremendous amount.

Sorry, I'm not ranting at you just at the narrow mindedness of politicians. But why are politicians even involved? As far as i can tell the schools where I come from had a great degree of autonomy, much more than it seems they have now unless they are those odd things called academies.

@ninalanyon Ah - my old school had a set of after-school clubs including an Operatic Society similar to yours, and it put on a yearly G&S operatta in the town's theatre.

Then when it all went "Comprehensive" the new headmaster swepit it away on the bizarre, petty excuse that "Opera has no place in a comprehensive school".

No politicians involved, just an inverted snob in the wrong employment.

@ArishMell I'm sorry to hear that. It must have been a severe disappointment.

But my school was a comprehensive as were almost all the schools in the town of over a hundred thousand people. By the time I was leaving primary school (mid 60s) there was only one grammar school left, all the other schools were comprehensive.

We were encouraged to do extracurricular things. Sometimes the encouragement was the next best thing to an order like the time us sixth formers were asked to do organic chemistry analyses for the fourth formers who had been out collecting soil samples alongside the, then fairly new, M4. We could have said no but the deputy head, an iron haired woman of friendly but steely demeanour, would have been very disappointed. She always asked as though it would never occur to her that anyone would say no.

It wasn't until I got to university and compared educational experiences with my fellow students that I started to understand how lucky I had been to grow up where and when I did.

@ninalanyon What they did was to give more time to STEM subjects and took it away from the subjects that enrich lives (but don't enrich financially).

@FreddieUK I think they teach transferable skills now.

@peterlee I'm sure they do, but that's can be true of, say, playing together in an orchestra/band. All the most noted engineers had brilliant imaginations as well as theoretical knowledge of forces learned through maths and physics.

@peterlee What's a transferable skill? And how is it taught?

@ninalanyon The beauty is you dont teach them.