The major financial problems facing many American school districts have caused too many schools to look elsewhere to find threatened educational services. There is a continuing scramble that sets in opposition school against school and district against district in relentless battles over businesses willing to finance special programs for handicapped students and accelerated programs for high ability learners.

Some budget-squeezed school districts are increasingly turning to "exposure" programs that substitute exposure to music instead of deeply involving children in learning how to read music, understand music, and sing and play musical instruments. Where this happens, sitting and listening to someone else do the real thing is taking the place of the very best learning: learning by doing. The reason, of course, is that actually providing a teacher and a program that instills music in children, the same way an arithmetic teacher instills the essentials of mathematics into a fifth-grader, costs "real" money, not substitute. It is as if we had decided not to teach children their multiplication tables, but to let them watch their teacher operate a calculator instead.

Rather than a "hands-on" education in music, one that teaches understanding and real skills, an "exposure" program means children get a talk by a visiting artist, a trip to a museum, a symphony concert, or a classroom videotape of A Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra. The lesson that is reinforced in children's mind is the same one that is delivered by Music Television (MTV): that their relationship with music is supposed to be passive. Music is something they watch other people do, rather than something they do for themselves.

The fundamental point is that mere "exposure" to music and musicians can never equate with actual "hands-on" music education. In the end, the mistaken substitution of "exposure" programs for "hands-on" programs leaves students "theorizing" music, instead of "doing" music. You cannot provide a music education through "exposure" any more than you can teach children about the history of the Civil War by taking them to see Gone with the Wind. As so, this turns out to be a case in which the argument that "something is better than nothing" turns out to be self-deceiving. The efforts of well-intentioned school officials to salvage something through "exposure" programs reinforces a view of music education that can ultimately weaken it.

Of course, "exposure" programs can impart something of value. Students should hear and watch music performed, just as they should hear and see a Shakespeare play in addition to performing it themselves in the high school auditorium. But when used alone, "exposure" programs reinforce two false ideas about music education: ¹⁾ music is peripheral to "real" education, and that ²⁾ a passive relation to music is an acceptable alternative to a comprehensive, balanced, sequential music education, taught by qualified teachers. Neither is acceptable. And as long as mere "exposure" is permitted to substitute for actual "hands-on" education, music education in our schools will remain in trouble.

As long as the future of school music programs is dictated by these flawed educational concepts, where it proceeds from one misguided rescue operation to another, and as long as mere "exposure" is permitted to substitute for actual "hands-on" education, music education in our schools will be in trouble. We need a clearer perspective. At a minimum, that perspective will contain two key elements.

First, supporters of school music education must recognize, and act upon, the truth that decisions about what schools teach and why they teach it has to be rooted in a sound philosophy of education on the one hand, and what taxpayers believe is important for their children to learn on the other. A policy that substitutes an artificial "exposure for real music education will not change without a policy challenge that says: "This is what we believe education is all about and what it should include." In short, there must be a specific commitment to what public education is supposed to do. At the same time, the music community has to influence policy and decision makers to create public education that reflects the priorities of the people who are paying for it. In sum, until those who care about music education, teacher, parent, and taxpayer, are ready to insist on the education importance of "hands-on" music education over mere "exposure" to music, nothing will really change.

Second, we have to recognize that making up budgetary shortfalls by developing artificial "exposure" programs inevitably leads to polarized school system in which parent groups and communities that are wealthier can raise the extra money to get authentic music education for their kids, while those from less advantage circumstances cannot, and have to settle for mere exposure, or nothing at all. In the end, where music education is concerned, the inevitable result will be a cultural class system.

Tragically, that result is already taking shape in states like California, where $620 million is being squeezed from the education budget by cutting programs in music and the other arts statewide, leaving poorer districts who cannot find other resources to fend for themselves. Similar developments are underway in other states, and in Philadelphia, Washington, Chicago, Detroit, and Tucson, and scores of other local educational systems throughout the country.

If the goal we seek is a real, "hands-on," music education for our children, then neither substituting private dollars for public ones, or replacing educationally sound music education with synthetic "exposure" programs will do. In the end, only taxpayers can halt the downward spiral and create the kind of climate at the local level that is acceptable.