Sliding into Philosophy
Sorrow and Regret or Life at its Best - That's the Question
Last time, we promised DnM that we’d “get our heads together” and start asking the right questions. In honour of Regelski, I’m going to call this “sliding into philosophy”. Regelski reminded us that when we slide into philosophy we have some rules to go by: like, you need to know what’s already been said on a topic. But what are the topics and what are the questions?
The Septem Circumstantiae
Enter Aristotle sometime around 350 BC with the “Septem Circumstantiae” aka the “Seven Circumstances” or what journalists call the “Five W’s (and one H)" (Sloan, 2010, Robertson Jr, 1946). In Book 3 of Nicomachean Ethics (“Say That Word Second™”) Aristotle wrestles with the concept of just vs unjust actions and determines that “it is necessary for students of virtue to differentiate between … voluntary and involuntary [acts]” (Eth. Nic. 1109b32–35), essentially another angle on the “beware of stealthy assumptions” warning.
According to Sloan (2010), Aristotle believed that “any statement must be made plausible or convincing by adding detailed information” and he provided the template of the seven types of circumstance as a strategy to work through “in order to supply substantial information to corroborate one’s statement” (p. 248) and avoid “regretted actions” (p. 245).
Boethius and the Seven Questions
About 850 years after Aristotle, Roman philosopher Boethius fashioned the circumstances into seven questions that work really well when translated into English as:
Who,
What,
Why,
How,
Where,
When,
With what?
Aristotle cautions us on the dangers of ignoring the circumstances of our actions saying:
Thus with ignorance as a possibility concerning […], the circumstances of the act, the one who acts in ignorance of any of them seems to act involuntarily, and especially regarding the most important ones. And it seems that the most important circumstances are those just listed, including the “why.” Indeed inasmuch as an action has been called involuntary in accordance with such ignorance, still it is necessary that the deed evokes sorrow and regret. (Eth. Nic. 1111a15–20 quoted in Sloan, 2010, p. 240).
Thankfully, Boethius, has given us a list of seven questions that we can use to help us to act justly and voluntarily and to hopefully minimise our “sorrow and regret”. But, in a footnote at the bottom of that last quote, Sloan offers an alternative translation that might just be a game changer for us:
“And it seems that the most important circumstances are the ‘who’ and the ‘why.’” (2010, p. 240).
Sliding into Philosophy with Seven Questions
Now, we are starting to build in some more rules for “sliding into philosophy”. We can use the Septem Circumstantiae to help us to construct our own philosophies of education which will illustrate our actions (you’ll recall that I call my version: Bradagogy). We can begin by using them to interrogate the essentially contested concepts at the core of our profession. Rather than making assumptions about education we can ask questions like:
Who is classroom music education for?
Why should those students have access to classroom music education?
What should they learn about music?
How should they learn it?
With what should they learn? - for example this might open up questions about technology rich vs technology restricted
Where should they have their music classes?
When should they have their music classes?
And, of course, these questions rest on assumptions about who is education for generally and why should children be educated in schools etc, so you might like to start there before tackling the classroom music education questions. But remember, we don’t have to start from scratch - The Cats of Music Education have already thought about this so we can draw on their answers to help us to formulate our own.
Seven Questions for Reflective Practice
But wait, there’s more, we can also use the Septum Circumstantiae as the basis for our own reflective practice. This is a micro version of the big questions where we can look at the students in front of us and ask:
Who are these people, or even better, who are these persons, and even better, who is this person? Who am I doing classroom music education with and for?
Why am I doing classroom music education with and for them?
By getting the best possible answers to those two key questions, and only then, we can then start to think about the next set. Based on who is in our classrooms (including us), and why we are there:
What should we learn? Should everybody learn the same thing/s?
How should we learn it? Should everyone learn the same way?
What tools/technologies might we employ? Might these be different on a per student basis?
Where should we learn? This also works closely with “the how” and opens up questions about classroom design.
When should we learn? This opens up questions about co-curricular, blended learning etc.
As I’ve alluded here, these questions seem to have an interrelated feeling about them. The kinds of answers to one question has flow-on effects to other answers, “ingredients” change, you get better at asking questions, you get better at finding answers, and you test all of this out in real life as your theories illustrate your practice. To that end, I use “The Septum Circumstantiae of Classroom Music Education” as a schema or model to remind me to continue to rotate through these questions in my own practice. It’s a recursive model which simply means that it’s a repeating process whose output at each stage is applied as input in the succeeding stage, essentially a rinse and repeat.
Good Questions, Good Teaching, and Good Lives
So there you have it, an Aristotelian basis (that’s what philosophers call anything to do with Aristotle) for your reflective practice that also provides a tool for you to dig into the big questions at the core of our profession. As Aristotle reminds us, the “who” and “why” are the “most important”. I think there’s pretty solid evidence on the macro level that classroom music education has a history of making assumptions about the “who” and the “why” and jumping to the “what” and “how”. On the micro level, these assumptions have resulted in involuntary actions being carried out in music classrooms leading to much “sorrow and regret” for teachers and students. Aristotle wrote the Nicomachean Ethics as part of his greater project to understand what human beings need in order to live life at its best (Kraut, 2022). If classroom music education is leading to sorrow and regret rather than life at its best “perhaps we’re asking the wrong questions”?
💎 Brad’s Bookmarks:
5 things I found interesting this week:
Shutter Encoder: Make webm video’s for your LMS/website for free.
Pete and I (and Dr James Humberstone FRSA) have been alluding to the Mighty Boosh a lot over this week. This Jazz Trance scene is iconic.
Sting - Bring On The Night (1985): The behind the scenes documentary.
Andrew Huang is up to some good things with creative challenges. They weren’t allowed to talk in the creation of this piece.
Hiromi: Tiny Desk Concert. She’s so great.
💣 Brad’s Bombshell of the week:
How could anything as widespread and culturally pervasive as music education require serious thinking, let alone “a philosophy”? The answer is simple. As the Roman poet Phaedrus said, “Things are not always what they seem; the first appearance deceives many; the intelligence of a few perceives what has been carefully hidden” (Elliott and Silverman, 2015, p. 6)
p.s. Want to get to know me (and other GBLers) further?
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Dr Brad Fuller