Bog Standard, Part 1

The light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train...

I knew it was coming.  From the moment the Common Core standards came out, I knew it would happen:  National Music Education Standards.

Standards, why does it have to be standards?  

Standards are awful.  They are demeaning.  They are a waste of paper and electrons.  They are tedious and soul-sucking.  They take a beautiful vibrant subject such as music (and history, literature, mathematics, science, drama, and all the others), and transforms it into a soggy, dry, depressing, boring, dull, fatuous pile of steaming bureaucratic bullshit.

There, I said it, standards are shit.  Seriously, they are.  They are a make work project for administrators and education groups.  They try to codify what every student should learn, but at the same time claim that no topic or creation or person or idea is more important than any other.  In essence, standards take hundreds of thousands of words to say absolutely nothing.  Since they say nothing, standards are useless in the classroom.  You can't teach standards, no one can.  Standards have to be translated into curriculum: The actual topics, creations, people and ideas that are shaped into lessons and then taught and tested.

Why can't we just skip the standards and go right to curriculum?  Would it be that difficult to come together and say: Every child should learn to read melodies in treble clef, sing rounds on pitch, play a musical instrument, sing the national anthem and America the Beautiful, identify the instruments of the orchestra, and a few of the major works of  Mozart, Beethoven, and J.S. Bach?  Really is it that hard?

None of those things are in the new music standards.  So I guess the answer to my question is: "Yes, yes it is."