In this book, John Finney examines the child-centred progressive tradition from 1950, and its influence on, outworking through, and evidencing in trends in music education in England. At least that is what the book purports to do; in reality it is so much more. It offers an historical contextualising of how English music education came to be in the position it is today, all viewed through the perceptive eyes and nicely turned phrases of John Finney. Indeed, for Finney this is also a journey through a series of memories; as he observes in the Preface, it is the time in which he has ‘lived music education’.

But what of the title, and what does it mean? ‘The child-centredness of which I write can have no pure form and is best referred to as a child-centred progressive tradition. Within this frame of reference I do have in mind a particular kind of relationship between teacher, pupil and what is being learnt . . .’ (p. 6). And this is always at the centre of what Finney writes about. Music is a profoundly human experience, and, indeed, humanity is very firmly at the heart of this book.

The book is structured using a series of episodes, moving chronologically through the period in question. It begins with a study of the work of Sybil Marshall and her influence on primary school teachers. In this chapter an early indication of one of the key themes of this book is felt – that of music as a unique way of knowing. Writing of Marshall, Finney observes that she made clear ‘. . . the subtle balance needed between the transmission of knowledge and the remaking of it’ (p. 21). This issue of knowledge and knowing, and the relationships between them, run like an idée fixe throughout.

The next episode considers the 1960s and 70s, and examines, inter alia, the writings of Witkin and Ross, and the School's Council music project. What emerges is a ‘struggle for culture, a struggle for the soul of education’ (p. 30). This struggle for culture is one which resonates down to our own times, and at its centre is the question ‘. . . whose music should children and young people encounter in the first and formative stages of their lives?’ (p. 36). This question did then, and does now, occupy us considerably in music education! It was during the 1960s that ‘music in secondary schools became for the adolescent a place to exhibit apathy, hostility, rejection and for music teachers to respond with a kind of historical intertia’ (p. 39). Writing this review at a time when the future of music education in the UK is by no means clear, I wonder if ‘historical inertia’ might not be a default position for some music educators? But back to the 1970s, and Witkin's text The Intelligence of Feeling (Witkin, Reference Witkin1974). In this, Finney's observation is that Witkin ‘. . . establishes a way of ‘being’ and ‘knowing’ that involves a reciprocal relationship between the knower and her medium of expression’ (p. 41), thus providing another link in the knowledge–knower–knowing chain, and another key plank in Finney's argument.

Episode three is centred around Paynter's seminal text Sound and Silence (Paynter & Aston, Reference Paynter and Aston1970), and is appropriately entitled ‘Coming to Know Music’. ‘In Sound and Silence the work undertaken had its genesis in the practices of composers whose works pupils would come to see as related to their own work. The dead hand of tradition had been removed’ (p. 53). Finney describes how he went on a day of training led by Paynter, which raised profound questions for him: ‘whose music and whose music education was this?’ (p. 55). The story of Finney's adoption of what he nicely calls his secunda prattica follows, where he discovers that ‘. . . classes could move forward organically, that one idea led to another . . .’ (p. 55). ‘Paynter's chief enemy was music education reduced to a narrow course of musical training where tutored skills and proficiencies dominated to the exclusion of imagination and creativity’ (p. 57). Again and again in its description of the past I found much which was pertinent to our present-day situation. And yet many of our current generation of music teachers had not even been born in 1980. Another resonance: ‘why for example should [composing and improvising] . . . depend upon the acquisition of conventional skills in notation reading and writing?’ (p. 58). I am very well aware as I write this that each year in the PGCE course in secondary music that I teach upon, what has come to be known as ‘The Notation Argument’ forms a major part of the course, and tends to rumble on throughout. It is fascinating to recall that the roots of this argument are to be found in a time well before the majority of QTS trainees had imbibed their first quaver.

The key role of Keith Swanwick is also to be felt in this chapter. Writing of A Basis for Music Education (Swanwick, Reference Swanwick1979), Finney summarises, and takes a pop at some current misconceptions too: ‘The practice of teaching is not to be entangled with aims, assessment with learning . . .’ (p. 59). How true.

If I were to find any aspect of this book lacking it would be that I do not think that Finney conveys the anger and animosity of internecine fighting that took place between music teachers at this time. But Finney's velvet glove does contain an iron fist: ‘Without music viewed as a creative art it loses legitimacy as a curriculum subject . . .’ (p. 58). Indeed. But Finney does observe that all was not well in music education, and creative music-making was problematic ‘. . . requiring a range of skills that few teachers possessed or were motivated to acquire’ (p. 70) and that ‘. . . music maintained an ambivalence towards the pre-eminence of a making curriculum centred on composing’ (p. 70). And what could be stronger than this: ‘The ‘Arts and the Adolescent’ project had exposed the moribund antiquity of music in the secondary school . . .’ (p. 72). Again, this makes me wonder about the present.

Episode four takes as its starting point the work of four adolescent boys engaged in creating meaning for themselves in their own music-making. From here a number of other lenses are employed to look at what was going on at the time, both within the author's own practice, and beyond. It was during the 1980s and 90s that the National Curriculum came into being, and again Finney's concern with knowledge becomes apparent: ‘The report (DES, 1991) argued for the centrality of listening, composing and performing activities and that it would appropriate to think of these as ‘skills’. Doing became thought of as skill, the making, the experience of being musical as a way of knowing in and for itself was given up to knowledge about music . . . the group had, despite a hint of recognizing that that knowledge might involve a subtle form of cognition and be more than conceptual, aligned musical knowledge and understanding with the propositional . . .’ (p. 88). He goes on to observe ‘. . . now that music ceases to be a statement in itself, experience-knowledge as aesthetic knowledge with its highly prized tacit components is lost to a form of knowledge beyond music . . . the aesthetic dimension . . . had been expunged from the nation's consciousness by the Education Reform Act of 1988’ (p. 89). This moves us well away from a child-centred approach, as knowledge – whatever that now is in music education – has been decided for the child (and the teacher) elsewhere. Knowledge is thus separated from the knower, and education had become ‘. . . about equipping children with knowledge and there was to be one size of knowledge to fit all’ (p. 90).

The loss of true child-centred education, according to Finney, therefore hangs on the breakdown of the relationship between the knower and the known. When what is to be known is now prescribed, the relationship loses dynamic impetus. This takes us to the thorny issue of assessment. Assessment from this stance cannot be a ‘. . . sensitive conversation between teacher and pupil . . .’ (p. 92), but becomes an accountability issue. Finney usefully contrasts differences to assessment between writings of Ross and Paynter, and again, knowledge lies at the heart of these, taking a sideswipe at school leadership teams in the process: ‘curriculum managers came to present knowledge as a bland conception standing independent of the knower, a profane triumph over the sacredness of human interests’ (p. 95).

In terms of assessment as represented by the NC and the now-ubiquitous levels, Finney, rightly in my view, regards their writing as ‘a not inconsiderable achievement’ (p. 124). Problems occurred in the way they were used, and, to some extent, by the model of progression which the levels exemplified, where ‘progression in music was to be marked by a particular form of cognitive shift’ (p. 124). In this way, and working backwards from the levels to teaching and learning, the official curriculum can be viewed as ‘. . . outcomes-centred rather than child-centred . . .’ (p. 125).

The NC was supported by the development of a national strategy for music from 2005. One outcome of this was that ‘. . . for the first time since the establishment of universal education in 1870, a detailed model of pedagogy for music was now available’ (p. 126). The pedagogy espoused by the strategy involved ‘developing musical understanding, understanding of musical conventions as they exist within musical traditions, genres and styles and as experienced through and referenced to musical activity’ (p. 127). This aspect of strategy thinking clearly bothers Finney, and he notes ‘that to be musical and understand music might involve feeling and thinking, the body as well as the mind is not considered within the strategy’ (p. 130). The implications of this are that what is valued becomes what is assessed, and what is assessed comes to be what is valued, and this in turn excludes other ways of knowing. This means that ‘the pupil is a recipient of a top-down managed curriculum’ (p. 131). This, Finney notes, contrasted with the roughly contemporaneous Musical Futures work. ‘Musical Futures . . . was a far distance from stipulating definitions of ‘musical understanding” (p. 134).

Which brings us to the final chapter, where we reach the present, now more clearly viewed through the lenses of the past. There are more nicely phrased moments of concern; I particularly liked ‘. . . the child is continually assessed, labelled and packaged as a unit of production and the school customized to the measures of achievement publicly declared’ (p. 150). This is a damning indictment of the audit culture in which we now live. Finney is also scathing about our current fixation with advocacy: ‘perhaps there has never been so much advocacy for music education and so little attention to purpose, aims, and values’ (p. 153).

So, what are we left with after reading this book? As I suggested above, a feeling that it does more than its title would suggest. It is a philosophical consideration of the role of knowledge in music education; it asks awkward questions of the reader; and through the onward march of time explains how we came to be where we are today in English music education. It is unsettling, profound and disquieting. But maybe more than anything else it laments the losing of humanity from music education. Finney's own view of music education involves participants as people, not units of assessment; ‘the making process, coming to know and understand music in this view is deeply humanizing’ (p. 71), and it is a human feeling, and lamenting the losing thereof, that we are left with.

In conclusion, this is a book with a great deal to say. I hope that English music teachers will read it and reflect, that policy makers will think about what we want from music education, and that those involved in music education read it and deliberate upon whether what they are doing is more than hollow advocacy. My worry is that at over £50 it is not cheap, and deserves a wider audience than the price might allow. It is also available as an e-book, and in that format I shall be recommending that my QTS students use it as a text when they ask about how we ended up in the situation we are today.

(Although I do wish the copy editor had corrected the mis-spelling of Cavaillé-Coll!)