BIOS Reporter – Volume 27, No.3 – July 2003

It seems that in many primary schools children arc not being given a musical education. Whether one approves or not of the way in which education is organized, it has to be recognized that the insatiable thirst of government for statistics relating to the performance of pupils has led to a concentration on those areas of the curriculum which can be tested to produce those figures. For the last twenty years the importance of certain subjects, notably Mathematics, English and the sciences has been promoted, while other subjects have disappeared into vacuous headings such ‘the humanities’ and ‘the arts’. Recent efforts to improve the literacy of pupils, we arc told, have led to the exclusion of some subjects, such as music, altogether…