Article 31, Section 2 of the Convention of the Rights of the Child states:
States shall respect and promote the right of the child to participate fully in cultural and artistic life and shall encourage the provision of appropriate and equal opportunities for cultural, artistic, recreational and leisure activity.
(United Nations 1989, p.9) Although Ireland is party to the Convention of the Rights of the child, it does not approach Article 31 with any real sense of providing ‘appropriate and equal opportunities for cultural, artistic, recreational and leisure activity’. A public policy is unjust when an individual or a whole social group can be shown to be losing out in comparison to others in the distribution of societies’ advantages (Miller, 1999, p. 1). In A Theory of Social Justice (1971), John Rawls provides a framework for the distribution of goods and responsibilities among members of a society, assuming it consists of free and equal persons. A basic concept of justice is that of distributive
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justice which suggests that all members must receive a fair share of both public goods and public responsibilities (Rawls 1971, p. 4).
...the primary subject of justice is the basic structure of society, or more exactly, the way in which the major social institutions distribute fundamental rights and duties and determine the division of advantage from social cooperation (Rawls 1971, p.7).
According to Rawls’ model, social institutions, such as family, private property, education and health systems, constitutional rights, competitive markets, and so on, have a major influence on a person’s life prospects and opportunities, but social position due to class membership comprises a key factor in achieving life’s opportunities.
2.5.1 Private or public good?
Publicly provided goods and services share certain features: costs are divided among community members who may have differing wealth, tastes and interests; supply is subject to collective demand depending on local demographic characteristics; tax burdens are equitably divided; public goods are not subject to exclusion, but are subject to jointness of use (Bergstrom and Goodman 1973, p.280; Ostrom 1999, p.1). An example of jointness of use are police and health services, which are of primary benefit to individual citizens, but also have substantial external benefit for the community (Ostrom 1999, p.18). The education system, which is of both primary and external benefit, is vulnerable to manipulation by parties with vested interests because educational goals are many and varied.
The public instrumental music provision bears many features of the private sector, which is co-ordinated through the market system of supply, competitive buying and selling, distributed in a manner that cannot fully meet demand (Ostrom 1999, p.1). Due to its peripheral position in relation to the Irish education system, instrumental music education is vulnerable to colonisation by middle-class families.
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Many middle-class and upper middle-class parents, aware that education is not neutral, choose schools with prestigious reputations, seeking academic success for their children over others (Bernstein 2001, p.xxiii). In this manner, public goods can effectively be vulnerable to a form of quasi-privatisation. Sensitive to perceptions of opportunities and constraints, individuals apply strategies in order to enhance well- being (Ostrom 1999, p.9). Instrumental music education presents as a privatised public good, provided at public expense for the benefit of a minority of citizens, but funded by the entirety of the population (Langbeim 2004, p.86).
2.5.2 The illusion of choice
The instrumental courses are offered as optional and discretionary to anyone who wishes to apply. While this arrangement might be nominally open and fair, on closer inspection equality of choice to participate in learning musical instruments proves to be illusionary rather than substantive, what Bernstein referred to as horizontal
solidarities (Bernstein 2000, p.xxv; Bernstein 2001, p.28). Horizontal solidarities are
the means by which state agencies create the illusion that the ‘vertical’ divisions of social inequality experienced by children are neutralised by offering equal access to the resources, opportunities and advantages that schools can provide (Spruce 2013, p.112). In actuality, those without appropriate cultural, social or economic capital are effectively denied an aspiration that their children might experience the benefits of playing a musical instrument. This constitutes a social disjuncture between the wish to participate and the means of access, which is hidden by the ‘façade of equal opportunity’ (Lynch and Moran 2006, p.122).
The ability of middle- and upper middle-class families to seek out and appropriate educational opportunity for their children is a recognised social phenomenon. ‘Families and education interact to produce and reinforce social and economic
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inequalities in society’ (Bourdieu 1986, p.122; Drudy and Lynch 1992, pp.138, 157). The ability to negotiate the education system gives a material and cultural advantage to middle- and upper middle-class families over working-class families in terms of life choices (Lynch and Moran 2006, p.221). In short, for low-income families choice is, at once, limited and limiting. According to Lynch and Moran, choice ideology, allied to meritocratic individualism, fosters an illusion of educational choice (p.222). This is the widely accepted notion that if you have the ability and you choose to work hard, success will surely follow. The meritocracy of choice fails to acknowledge the class differential of ‘starting-place’ or, in Bourdieu’s terms, class habitus.
2.5.3 Distributive justice
A habitus differential must be taken into the reckoning when considering how public cultural goods are to be fairly distributed as the reality of unequal ‘starting-place’ renders problematic the concept of distributive justice. Growing up in the middle- class family, the practical mastery of the mother tongue prepares children for the scholarly language of education (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977, p.71) In comparison, growing up in an unskilled working-class family, a child is likely to be comparatively linguistically limited due to a cultural discontinuity between the languages of home and school. An ability to use an elaborated language gives more socially advantaged children an enhanced ‘starting-place’ in the field of education (Drudy and Lynch 1993, p.152; Wright 2008, p.14).
The evocation of hierarchy and power through the legitimate language of education echoes the ‘ghostly memories of legitimate cultural capital’ of classical music. The legitimising effect of cultivated language and the high-cultural value of Western art music place both within the cultural repertoires of already advantaged social groups
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(Bennett et al 2009, p.75). Because individual and social valorising of particular public goods may diverge, instrumental music education is peripheral in the debate on social justice (Miller 2003, p.7). It is likely that the enhancement of people’s lives by active musical participation would not be equally regarded as a realisable prospect by all social groups. Individual values and priorities vary, and the priority between funding the cost of a child’s music lessons and the sense of value and benefit to be derived would vary from family to family. This raises a problem of definition for advocates of public resources or services, which might regarded as vital by some but met with indifference by others
When assessing distributive justice, the enrichment potential to people’s lives is probably not a material consideration. As distributive justice does not concern itself with the manner in which public goods enhance individual lives, a purely distributive framework may be insufficient in addressing the means of equitably sharing public cultural and educational goods.
2.5.4 Status equality and parity of participation
A status equality model of social justice based on the capacity of institutions to enact parity of participation focuses on constructs of common humanity to promote the fair distribution of cultural goods among members of all social groups (Fraser 2001, p.25). The adoption of status equality as a lens with which to assess fairness and equity of distribution, places a focus on the extent to which individuals or groups are enabled to access and participate in publicly-funded educational provision by virtue of equal entitlement. A status equality assessment exposes to scrutiny exclusionary practices with regard to publicly-funded enrichment activities, which are defined by ‘institutionalised patterns of cultural value’ (Fraser 2001, p.38).
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The level of intentionality of policy makers in application of parity of participation must be exposed to scrutiny. The fact that well-subsidised music services staffed by well qualified teachers are provided by some local education authorities, suggests that some local educational bodies, as well as a significant proportion of middle- class society in those areas, regard the learning of musical instruments to be a valued and important part of children’s personal and social development. The willingness of a small number of local VEC/ETBs to fund an instrumental music educational service in their areas suggest that those public bodies are sensitised to the high value placed on it by local parent groups. Parity of participation deriving from recognition of status equality would be the litmus test of a truly socially just instrumental music education provision.