De huidige situatie van het muziekonderwijs

Today, the extracurricular musical landscape looks different from, say, 15 years ago. This is under considerable pressure in terms of financing in many places. On the one hand, this is due to declining funding from local governments, resulting in rates having to rise and accessibility being jeopardized, and on the other due to a declining interest in active music-making outside of school by young people. This can partly be explained by the extent to which attention is paid to music in the classroom at school. The choice of leisure activities is enormous and the ever-increasing digitization, the use of smartphones and tablets, is increasingly taking up the free time of not only young people. In absolute terms, out-of-school participation has been declining over the past 10 years, but it is in line with dejuvenation: the number of children in primary schools has also decreased on average.

How different does the landscape of in-school music education look in our environment. In our working area, at 30 primary schools in the region (but also at primary schools outside our working area) in-school music lessons are provided by Art4U specialist teachers in all groups. We thus reach more than 6500 students.

Art4U started in mid-2006 with project-based music lessons in a number of groups at various primary schools in its area of ​​work. These lessons were always received with great enthusiasm and the call from primary education was increasing not only for a single group but for all groups, i.e. school-wide, to provide an appropriate, high-quality range of lessons in which cooperation with the associations would also form an important part. . Art4U's education coordinators have responded with great energy to this question and have developed a tailor-made lesson program for each primary school year in close consultation with their subject teachers, the teachers of the primary schools and the amateur art associations. Thus, in 2014, the “Music training route for primary education” was created.

It was striking that the more music that was made in the classroom at the schools, the more concretely and accurately the schools in our working area could formulate their wishes to adjust a number of matters in terms of content. For example, there was an explicit wish from the teachers of groups 1-2, 3 and 4 to receive lessons from a subject music teacher for an entire school year instead of just 10 lessons per school year. The role of the teachers in groups 1-2 could be more emphatic in the field of music and for this teachers needed “coaching on the job”. Until then, Group 5 had a series of lessons on “testing instruments” in which they became acquainted with all instrument groups without playing them themselves (rather passively) and the explicit question from education was to have this target group also actively play an instrument in rather than just being allowed to "smell" it. For the senior groups, there was a demand from the school boards to extend the scope of the instrument classes beyond just the wind class, the accordion class and percussion class in collaboration with the associations. In the years from 2015 Art4U has adapted and tuned the lesson series accordingly.