Is it the beginning of the end for the fee paying schools in the UK, or just being able to teach musical instruments in them?

This is a question which I have pondered quite a lot in the last year or so, from the perspective of the visiting music teachers because they are an important part of their income.

Let’s face it the public schools in the UK have survived two world wars and although many went bust there are a number that have survived since the time of Henry VIII, but maybe the Internet is a bigger threat than Nazi Germany! Technology has already managed to dismantle the music industry, and also the world of the newspapers; it is also doing a good job taking on the world of publishing!

I read a little while ago an article by Lorena McKennitt, about the effect that technology had on the music industry with open full-scale piracy being the norm now for public schools. It’s not so much piracy, but the fact that education can be undertaken on the Internet for very little money. Schools have become part of the childminding industry as an unintended consequence for some, they have developed this as a side-line business with breakfast clubs and after school activities.  What would you do with your children when you go to work everyday? If you can have a school activity to put them in that solves the problem.

So what I’ve seen recently is a squeeze on lessons from the point of view of cost, and of time; these are some of the games that are played on the peripatetic music staff.

 The cost of lessons is increased to the parents, but remains fairly consistent to the music teacher. Now I experienced this first hand with one of the fee paying schools that I worked where the rate was only going up (if it did go up) by a percentage point per year , but the parents were paying significantly more each year. The cost reached £50 an hour  of which the music staff were only getting  (with everything included such as pension payments and petrol and supposed holiday pay) £30 an hour maximum. Now the reason behind this I fully understand from a business perspective, because the school suddenly had an unexpected increase in costs from the Church of England. They owned the land that the buildings sat on, took the pepper corn rent thousands of pounds in a year, adding this to costs of government guidelines on child protection and the increase in the employers contribution to the teacher pension fund they were looking for as many soft targets as possible.

Time that staff contribute for free

The other game that is played is when the pupils cannot have lessons, so that could be the whole of the lunchtime, church services and if the school is attached to a cathedral et cetera that becomes even more pronounced. Lessons where the pupil is taken to play sport or there’s a school trip, and often in these cases the teachers are never advised in advance. So like a zero hours contract if you are not teaching, you often are not being paid.

Streamlining timetables 

The so-called streamlining of the school timetable where the lessons have to coordinate to the timetable which will mean there could be up to 10 minutes lost time per lesson; the academic lesson is 40 mins the music lesson is 30minutes which means there is 5 minutes for a pupil to arrive at the beginning and 5 to leave. This results in a significant drop in the income of the peripatetic teacher.

Now I’m not sure whether the streamlining effect is something to do with inspection bodies suggesting better use of time et cetera, and then the school tick boxing by doing this sort of thing. But I feel this all comes from a perspective of desperation on the part of the school administration, because even a successful school with plenty of staff still has to take these jobs to already stretched employees in order to cut costs. 

Often these schools are in old buildings 

Most of these independent schools are in old buildings which brings with them a significant problem of upkeep. This is part of a problem that in some cases they may also be in listed building, which increases the costs considerably.

Who is paying the fess?

So now factor in who are the people paying the fees at these schools, and if these people are also under pressure financially because of problems in the workplace 

You only need to have one highly successful state school in the catchment area of a public school and they are in real trouble because if that school are getting results that exceed the public schools, which they often do, and they are not a grammar school (although the effect of the grammar schools in the Kent is significant) and there is no bullying, and there are no fees it’s a bit of a no-brainer. 

Back in the day being educated in a public school had real kudos the ‘Old School Tie’ effect, and it was an important way of getting into seriously good employment because of the connections that your school offered, but unfortunately that does not exist anymore. For those people reading this in the US that is similar to being able to state that you came from an Ivy League College

So, we will wait to see what will happen! I no longer work within this sector, however many of my friends do and they are already saying that the numbers are dropping off for lessons. We have already  got quite a heady cocktail, so for those of you who are involved in education and teaching in schools it might be advisable to find a few more baskets put your eggs in, just to be safe!

Vic 

Www.bluescampuk.co.uk

Three days of rocking and rolling playing the blues and reggae and jazz and funk, what more could you ask for!?

Heart attack and stroke, music to the rescue

It is close to a year since I had a heart attack and stroke, and what has music done for my recovery? 

At the end of January last year I had a heart attack, two days later a stroke.  Fortunately the heart attack was at home, my wife was there to call an ambulance; the stroke happened while I was still in hospital. This will explain to those of you who follow the blog why there has been a considerable break!

I obviously recovered well from the stroke, and although the lasting effects are quite subtle these are significant because they affect certain elements of my musical memory, and performance capability.

Most of this is to do with multitasking and learning new songs. It definitely takes me longer to process, particularly if I am playing and singing. However, what I want to focus on today is how I have found that learning and playing a musical instrument helped, and ultimately sped up my recovery.

First of all I was able to play, but the way it affected me was I felt very rusty and when it came to reading music it was like reading through a fog! However, by focusing on the small aspects of the task in front of me for example, reading a couple of bars of music very slowly,  I found after a short period of time that facility improved enormously. Likewise with playing, I found that regular short periods of practice enabled me to improve rapidly.

Another area that I found interesting was my cognitive ability particularly when it came to using a computer keyboard; I was affected in such a way that I couldn’t recognise certain letters on the keys. I had to relearn how to spell a number of words, it seemed as if I was reapplying my memory in another place and once this developed, that memory stuck.

So then I started doing some of my private lessons online using FaceTime or Skype I found that multitasking, such as listening to somebody play and watching them whilst typing  on another keyboard and remembering what it was I wanted to say when the person finished playing, speeded up my recovery  and cognitive repair.

I still get very tired when doing mental work, and I have to break my work down into small sections of time. I’ve also reduced the amount of work to only two days of actual physical face-to-face teaching which could last anything up to five or six hours. After that I definitely need to shut down, and I do this by meditating or power napping.

The experience of this has not been all bad, infact I have learnt a lot about certain states such as dyslexia from this experience. It has also given me chance to step back from what I was doing , and evaluate my work. This has led to me starting a  music charity, and focusing on podcasting.

As usual Blues Camp will be running next year,  but we did have to cancel this year. Part of the franchise moved to France, this will be running as part if it next year which is incredibly exciting!

So to sum up I have recovered well and my experience wouldn’t be the same as somebody else who had the same medical condition. However, I truly believe that playing a musical instrument, particularly when it is something you already do, can greatly benefit your recovery. This is because it is using existing memory and learning something new within that framework, which helps the brain’s elasticity. I’m not sure how easy it would have been to have learned an instrument from scratch after having stroke, but I tend to think that reassessing something that is already in the mind even if it is something that you did as a child has real potential, and this is often shown in studies of elderly people with dementia.

So, I will be back next week with another perspective about music! Please check out the podcast either on YouTube or iTunes podcast this is called ‘Creative’, There are a number of interesting interviews including Adele’s guitarist Ben Thomas, and a storyteller called Andreas Kornevall. All of these people have great ideas explaining how they became successful in their fields, and how they use creative thinking.

Remember Blues Camp for next year!  Please visit www.bluescampUK.co.uk for details

Vic

The Hidden Curriculum

"I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my thirty years of teaching: schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers to care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic -- it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor."

John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

It is a fascinating phenomenon within school education although on the surface it appears to be about teaching skills to people but it is more about the undercurrent of making people conform to a way of thinking. I have always been fascinated about the history of teaching and education and historically the state did not want people to know what was going on, that is why education was restricted first of all to the rich and ruling classes and only to the males. The timing of when education expanded to include the less noble classes firstly the middle classes and then the lower classes and then also to include women is a thing that fascinates me the most.

This tells us a lot about what education does because the drive to get the poor into schools was partly driven by the industrial revolution but mostly driven by what the Germans  and the French were doing. As the Germans got all of their working classes into schools we started to follow suit. This goes to show a cynical aspect that it is not really about educating people but about training and keeping up with the competition.

Today what passes as education is box ticking of things set by government and looks less and less about the old idea of opening the mind but more like binding it to the doctrine of the government think tanks. I liken it  to considering the education system as some form of thinking entity that overpowers the good intentions of teachers and even  pupils. The biggest damage that is caused by the education system is exactly what is implied in the above quotation, this idea of limitation, conformity and restriction. It is like the whole system has cast a spell over people making them feel that they cannot go against what they are being told as if it is some sort of rulebook on how to live your life and how to think. I am not sure whether we are going to get to the point like the emperor’s new clothes where we see things as they are and are able to change. It is quite likely that the system will change because it will fall apart at some point.

That falling apart may happen sooner than we imagine and it might hit independent schools first because of the rising costs incurred and charged by them. I have written about this before but there is an interesting similarity historically to the rise of the internal combustion engine, that when cars were being produced in great numbers the skills of the leather maker, the production of saddles the breeding of working horses many other skills related to the old transport system became obsolete. In reflection we can look at that and say why didn’t they see it coming. This could well be the situation in the education system at the moment. in the near future people will be taught at home or in some sort of electronic cottage which does not require teachers or staff just somebody to mind the kids and to some extent. in the US that’s already happening and in the UK if you speak to teachers much of their time is taken up in social administration and not education.

We should be able to see this coming, a change that will seem so obvious in the future but not clear to us at the moment, everything is there in place, everybody can be taught online now I do not necessary think this is a good idea because this is more of the same, the only to get out would be home educate your children.

So let’s take this back to the creative musician and teacher, what does that means for us?  The psychological benefits of learning a musical instrument may attract the type of people and parents who see that this is a way of developing thinking in their children and themselves and maybe that is our salvation, maybe the above quotation is an expression of the problems with the system generally and that we are beginning to see how much of a house of cards modernity appears to be.

Vic

www.bluescamp.uk.co.uk

come and play in a band see what you really can do, three days of fun and mischief.

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify simplify - Henry David Thoreau

The quote was written back in the 1850's it is true today than ever. The level of detail is now absurd and makes anything that we do seem like an impossible task but misses the point of how things work. Just imagine you could not eat anything unless you knew the details of your digestive system. In many ways that is what we do with everything, most things need just to be attempted and basic modicum of knowing or even no knowledge to make it happen.

Cooking is a good example of this (as well as music) just follow the recipe without knowing why it works, just follow the information that is required and that is it. In many instances knowing why something works does not increase its effectiveness and maybe life is like that, creativity certainly is. 

I have been going over much of my old NLP material for a project that I am doing and the idea of modelling someone who is good at the task you want to improve points to this. Just do what they do, nothing else, keep it simple and follow the path. the whys and wherefores do not improve this, just keep to the simple plan and do what they do. 

We need  time to create and we need uncluttered thinking to do this creating, much of the information we are being fed confuses us. What I used to see in adults that was a form of uncreativeness caused by the need for permission to be given before they could even think about letting go I now see it in children; the situation has not been helped by computers but is being made worse. Again if we look at what children do, they just copy what they see and what they feel and what they hear, there is no analysis just copy and then play with it. 

So as we enter another year and we are released from 2018 and all the chaos that has resulted from our political thinkers maybe the only thing for us is to keep it simple.
If complexity is the way then we would have found it by now, the way for us to deal with the modernity is for there to be more simplicity in our individual dealings with the world.

Now there's a thought. 

Vic 

www.bluescampuk.co.uk 

play in a rock band .. it is simple

What is in an age?

What is in an age? Forty the time of the grandparent

Sometimes we need to think of what our biological clock is telling us physically and mentally. We think that we have progressed, evolved however physically that is not true we are still inhabiting the same bodies as our ancestors but we are not as fit and we are not strong as they were.

In the past people would have by the age of 20 been parents by the age of 40 being grandparents by the age of 60 great-grandparents. Even by the age of forty we would be relying more on our wisdom than on our physicality. does this mean that our learning of information and skills is better earlier and that age brings with it a depth of understanding not available to the young? maybe it does, maybe it means that the learning of something like a musical instrument and its physical skills happen easier then but that age brings with it the ability to speak something deep with it. 

If we take that idea and move it into the world of work and todays obsession with technology does that mean that someone of twenty can run rings around someone of forty in the world of technology? Yes it does and you can see it happen. The reason for saying this is that someone trained in a skill that is changing rapidly such as computing needs to update information may be on the scrapheap by the age of 35, but his wisdom and application may not be. So look at what is happening to everything going online and becoming more technical, the older ones in society are being left behind HOWEVER they have always been the holders of wisdom in human society apart from our youth addicted 'culture' and the ones who know things on a deeper level, so what does that say for the society that we are in? 

So to music, the physical learning is better early in life but the depth comes later, so if you want to learn a skill in music making it in the early years is when to do it, then stick with what you know going deeper with age, retraining may well be a mistake both in music and in life. 

Vic 

www.bluescampuk.co.uk 

Change? Burn your bridges and destroy all the things that were you Humpty.

This time extreme measures for change, lasting change.  

I have pondered over the years how some people go on and realise their goals and many do not. Some of the musicians tour the world, others set up in business as a player and teacher and become successful at that. I had seen it in the areas of health, people who make the transition from illnesses to health and others who do not. As seen the people who cannot change like the smokers who have cancer who cannot give up smoking even when it means the difference between life and death.

So what is it that makes change possible? Some people seem wired up so that they can change, you will know some people like that, they seem to embrace change but I think they are in the minority for most of us it takes something else. For many having nothing to go back to is something that causes movement towards difference and away from something old and familiar, remember the familiar can be abuse and unhappiness, look at the people who leave one abusive relationship only to find themselves in another. Sometimes amping up the pain helps to make the move away from it easier and then you need to burn the bridges that would take you back. So pack up the job with nowhere to go, buy a one-way ticket to somewhere else. The Exodus story is a good metaphor, the people of Israel escaping Egypt not being able to return over the sea as after getting through the parted waves the sea returns therefore destroying their way back.

Now for destroying the image of you.

Bowie gave up Ziggy Stardust when he was at the top of his game and created himself anew, so working on yourself; now you cannot go back to the person before, letting go of what you were. Destroying the photos, anything symbolic, get some new clothes, change what you are wearing, and throw away the old. Now aim in the direction that you expect to arrive at, allowing things to come in and help, chance happenings, chance meetings and strange coincidences. On my podcast I interview musicians and artists and the times that they say that their lives changed in this way is the norm not something that was planned but something that was acted on. So the unexpected invitation to join a band which was responded to straightaway ,the chance hearing of them playing in a little pub in an out of the way place, the overheard conversation that gave you an idea etc. If you think this is a little bit woo- woo, then it is, I would say that it does not interest me whether we validate that but does it work? The evidence points to it, the data says that it does and secondly dismissing this may reflect the trap of one’s own thinking, because it is that type of thinking that stops change because it is risk averse. For real change, lasting change we need the ‘triple whammy effect’ that breaks you in such a way that you cannot reconstitute the old you anymore. A little bit like Humpty Dumpty

Vic Hyland

www.bluescampuk.co.uk

Now I have done the workshop, unleash me on the world.

Over the years of teaching and being involved in NLP I now see that I might be part of the problem, that of the weekend workshop. My fascination with the mind and consciousness has let me to explore many things, music, hypnosis, meditation and those things were fed into my work. However I have seen in my time the rise of the workshop seminar course on a level that certainly did not exist even a few years ago in this country. There are workshops for everything, hot yoga, raw food, Tantric techniques and all of this is driven by somebody selling something. 

Now as part of this problem I can see that the unintended consequence of this is someone goes to the weekend workshop and becomes a practitioner of it. Now I do not think that the university courses for things alternative are any better with herbalism courses that do not involve going out and finding the plants in the wild, and massage courses that don’t involve any physical contact, (I joke not) and music courses that do not teach how to make money, that has to be learnt by chance it seems. Obviously in the past if you wanted to use herbs you learnt literally in the field, the herbalist of old never learnt in a formal setting and therefore they never got caught into the intellectual way of exploring something: the way that involves the use of statistics and is data driven. Much of the data and statistics are at best misinterpretations and at worst are things that are pulled literally out of the air, I have seen data that supports something that later is refuted by other data, the thing that seems to be missing is personal experience.

So how does the teaching of music fit into this? Music once was the domain of the unprofessional, one would have learnt by watching and maybe being apprenticed to another musician. Once the church was involved then things got into a pattern so that musicians learnt to play to the script not only the written music but the essence of it and no funny stuff, (this is why improvisation fell out of favour). Contempory music in this country was until recently like the former description of learning on the job but now it is learning in a college setting and it has the hallmarks of what I was saying earlier something disjointed and removed from the root of the music. 

So what to do? Attending the workshop is okay however that is only the beginning of a long journey with the beginning point of ‘evangelising your enlightenment’ needs to be repressed and for the years to develop and mellow the fruit. That will eventually come along after the flowering of the seminar and college buds have fallen away and the developing fruit has withstood the rain, the pests, wind and all the interested birds of life looking to damage your ideas.

The resulting misshapen and damaged fruits no longer look like the pictures that the advertising gave you with their brilliance shown in the workshop but they will be nourishing and better than anything that a workshop picture will afford you. And how long does it take for the fruition?

10,000 hours………..

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk