The Flower and Fruit of Health, Virtue, and Happiness: Inwardness Turned Outward in American Public School Music Instruction from the Early Decades to the Present

Abstract

In this article, I analyze several of the key systems of reasoning that are embodied in several eras of music documents. Starting from these texts and reading across cultural practices that touched the curriculum, the analysis considers ideals and codes of behavior as systems of knowledge that fabricate who the learner is and what the substance of the lessons should be. My interest in these fabrications follows a body of scholarship in the history of education on the connection between the discursive environment of the child, schooling, and the constitution of social and political life The purpose of my analysis is to offer the music curriculum as an example of how lines of inclusion and exclusion are drawn.