Doom and Gloom
Sorry. Let me get back to my point.
As I have been going through this COVID pandemic, I have been thinking about the future of many of the institutions that we rely on that have had to change because of the virus. I have been stating since the start of all of this that we will have to change how we learn, how we teach, how we interact, how we do therapy, and how we teach others how to do music therapy. To this end, I have been writing some fiction about music therapy education in various times in the future. I am also preparing a conference presentation centered around this topic - looking at the possibilities that we now realize are possible because we have had to do them!
The crisis is coming from the current state of education in general in the United States. If you are unaware, teachers are quitting in droves. The teachers that are still around are getting sick and are having to work while being sick which is infecting students. Schools are having to close because there aren't enough well staff members to provide supervision to the students who arrive at the buildings each day. My state has recently reduced the requirements for substitute teachers because there aren't enough people who want to come into the schools. Another state has legislation going through the process where teachers will not be allowed to teach anything that has not been preapproved by parents. Any teacher who attempts to engage in unapproved topics or situations will be fired immediately. I can tell you that I am thrilled that I live in my state and NOT that state!
What I see (and here is where the doom and gloom and the existential crisis come from) is that education the way we did things pre-COVID is going to have to change significantly in the next 5-10 years. Some of these changes will be due to the continuing pandemic. Some of these changes will come from the mass exodus of professionals who cannot continue to be part of a broken system. Some of these changes will be due to the ignorance of those who do not educate children and young adults but who want to control what is being said. Some of these changes will be due to parents. Very few of these changes will come from the children and young adults.
I think that going to school will become rare for children pretty soon. I think that parents are going to continue to criticize those who have studied pedagogy and will drive teachers out of the profession to the point where a teaching degree will be something that will be rare. Since it will be more difficult to find teachers (we are already in this place, folks), education will move to more digital presentation and video school. If you do not have to go anywhere to be around other humans, then teachers can "teach" more humans at a time. Class sizes have little to no limit when you are all in your own spaces. Social and emotional skill development will become less of a need because we will all be isolated in our own places.
We will not be learning the rules of society of interaction with others. We will not get opportunities to know that what we do is not the same as what everyone else does in their pods. If we do have to leave our living spaces to be around other people, we will not be good at social interaction of any type. There will be more riots and violent responses to misunderstandings. There will be more awkward attempts to find mates. No one will know how to be in the presence of another person. We will be ready to head into stasis pods to travel to Mars because we will no longer know how to interact with a person outside of our particular family or living situation.
Hey, this is how my brain works...
If this scenario comes to pass, there will lots of things that are affected. There will lots of people who will be affected. Social services will change. Our competitiveness in the global world will change. So much is directly tied to how we educate our children. We may not see the effects of this pandemic until many years from now, but we will see effects. That is true - the effects may not be what I am predicting, but there will be changes that will be rooted in our pandemic experiences here. If you are doubtful, look at some of the lingering changes that happened after the influenza pandemic of the early 20th century. Here are some resources:
- https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181016-the-flu-that-transformed-the-20th-century
- https://asm.org/Articles/2021/March/How-the-Spanish-Flu-and-COVID-19-Pandemics-Transfo
- https://blogs.cdc.gov/publichealthmatters/2018/05/1918-flu/
- https://www.history.com/news/pandemics-advances
- https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/covid-19-how-spanish-flu-changed-world/
I do not claim to have done lots of research on these sources and have just skimmed through the content, but things did change in the world when the 1918 pandemic hit. Change is one of those inevitable things that happens when every person in the world is affected by something - by anything.
So, what does this have to do with the field of music therapy?
I am already having to make changes to how I train my interns due to their lack of direct interaction experience with live clients. We have found that we can teach about music therapy without having students sitting directly in front of us - whether we like that form of interaction or not - emotions and personal preferences aside, we can do this - we have had to. So, the question is going to be, will we insist that music therapy students leave their homes to travel to school? When does the need for social interaction become more important than disseminating knowledge? Who will make those determinations in our field? Will changes in our way of educating the next generations of music therapists make our profession more diverse or less so? What will happen when music therapists finish their educational programs and go out into the world of therapy interaction? Will music therapy become less hands-on and more through indirect service provision?
Once you start to think about these things, there are no clear answers or an ending. This is at the bottom of my existential crisis - who is to say what will happen? Who is to say what could happen? Who is going to make decisions about how to proceed? Will music therapy higher education be dictated by music therapists? Somewhat, but higher education institutions will probably dictate more of the ways that we offer education to future therapists in the next two decades. There are many things that our profession cannot control when it comes to higher education. That has always been the case, and I sincerely doubt that we will have any more power now than we did before the pandemic started.
I am going to spend some time in my futuristic exercise of writing stories about music therapists in the next couple of weeks. This is partially because of my desire to keep thinking about this topic, and partly because this is my topic of choice for my next professional presentation.
For the moment, though, if you are interested in some of my fiction writing, I have a label here called "Persephone." This story is concerned with what I think music therapy education will look like in the year 2049. Please note that these are my ideas, NOT facts. This story is just that - a story - that just helps me to process what is happening to us all and what can be possible. If you would like to read more, let me know, and I will send you a copy of what I have so far for your reading pleasure (???).
Happy Monday!
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