Deinstitutionalizing Music Education and Cultivating a Philosophy on Soil Daniel J. Shevock, Penn State Altoona (USA) Paper Presented at MayDay Group Colloquium 29 June 22, 2017, Gettysburg, PA “Let us look in silence, let us learn to listen; perhaps later we’ll finally be able to understand” (writer José Saramago reflecting on the Zapatista National Liberation Army; in de León 2001, xxii). Today I’m sharing a paper that is very much unfinished. This quote, from a collection of Zapatista writings, and describing the Zapatista movement is beyond the scope of the current analysis. However, the approach of Subcomandante Marcos, the real and extended allowing of indigenous wisdom to establish itself, inspires my personal unfinishedness and, as a result, thinking about institutions. Saramago’s simple “perhaps later” is the hinge on which this paper turns—that in both experience and theory aspects of praxis, we have been too quick to theorize, and often with too little humble, reflective experience with others. I hope this paper suggests possibilities, but is not finished. Its unfinishedness is purposeful, as most published papers in music education are finished: finished with a bowtie of action in the immediately imaginable—however embryonic our imaginations are at the time of writing. Our field, including myself, has too often portrayed our embryos as fully formed adults. Reflecting on Roots and Homo Educandus Musicae In my 2016 ACT article, Music Educated and Uprooted; I shared an autoethnography critiquing my experiences with music education as uprooting (Shevock 2016). I suggested that, through music education, children learn to understand their homes as “places to be left behind in the search for better, more cultured musics kept behind the walls of other, distant places” (50). I have been a certified music teacher since 1997. And I taught students of many ages, many races, genders, and social classes, and in suburban, urban, and rural places. Each semester I ask students how many already identify as “musicians,” and learn most do not. In our society, musician is a scarce identity. Looking around the globe at cultures untouched by music education, I cannot help but see music abundance. Music education seems to be involved in the production of non-musicians. Echoing Illichan criticism, I have come to think music education serves as a ritual for modern, industrial society—labeling humans as “musicians” and “non-musicians,” “graduates” and “dropouts,” and sustaining the myth of music scarcity. Through music education, industrial society gains people who identify themselves narrowly by institutionalized identities such as “accountant,” or “lawyer,” or “plumber” but not “musician”; or conversely as “musician” but not “mechanic,” or “physician,” or “farmer.” Division of labor is central to capitalist rationality. And even these identities leave out important non-institutionalized ones like “mother,” “gardener,” or “hiker,” identities our education hasn’t yet monetized and declared scarce. I have come to wonder if teachers, people who are uprooted and who find themselves in unfamiliar places away from family and childhood friends, may be most susceptible to this identity narrowing, and reinforce this uprootedness. According to philosopher Simone Weil’s (2002) dictum, “Whoever is uprooted himself In this paper, quotes utilizing gendered pronouns are unchanged. Because Weil’s book is a translation, and because I do not speak the original French, I do not know how important gender is to the construction of the philosophy. uproots others. Whoever is rooted himself doesn’t uproot others” (48). And as a music educator, I have uprooted students by instilling the transient professional desires of modern individuals. What does my complicity in music education institutions say about me? Who chooses to leave their hometown to pursue a career that is practically unobtainable in that hometown? What type of person is detained in schools from the age of five, and then chooses to detain others in schools for a living? Who chooses, following an extended incarceration and after observing non-institutionalized musical cultures thriving, to emerge as homo educandus musicae—“s/he who believes music education is a basic human need … and that music education is a prerequisite to meaningful musicing” (Shevock 2016, 44)? In this paper, I challenge music education institutions, extending the work I began in 2016, and explore possibilities for deinstitutionalization as (1) an imaginary practice and (2) a reality. The aim of this paper cannot be comprehensive. The topic is too big and too unexplored. Rather, the aim of this paper is to uncover some possibilities for critique as a philosophy on soil. Future work will have to explore possibilities in depth. As unfinished, this paper is a provocation for change but also a challenging of what change might be imagined and enacted. Questions, Questions, Questions Music education, especially as an expression of our published articles, seems to suffer from what I am calling premature reconstruction disorder (PRD). PRD reinforces and constructs institutionalized relationships among human and non-human beings. In this paper, “premature” is defined simply as executed too soon, and “disorder” as disarranged. In criticism, can an institution be fully deconstructed in a single, 20-page article? Two? Twenty? Do our institutionalized identities lead to institutionalized questions and answers? Music education writers seem to always aim to reinforce and construct institutions. This happens in every critical paper, whether five pages or 50, and well before institutions have been fully deconstructed. What is lost when our action always has to be action of the immediately imaginable? Critical theorist Erich Fromm wrote a full book of criticism, Escape From Freedom, before recommending actions based on those criticisms in The Sane Society (see Fromm 1990, vii). What answers will we, the institutionalized professionals, imagine in the here and now, in half articles, when we know the other half should be recommendations, even if we’re not ready to recommend yet? Is deinstitutionalization a possibility; and just what might deinstitutionalization be for us … professional music educators without the seeming attention span for truly sustained criticism? Despite our best intentions, we might be doing better while still falling short. I immerse myself in the role of iconoclast. Rejecting PRD, I recommend a process of sustained criticism as music education deinstitutionalization. I recommend a deinstitutionalized approach to critiquing and disassembling music education institutions modeled on the soil community, its interlocked living, free association, and rooted relationships. A number of Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education articles challenge institutions (e.g., Bates 2013; Bradley 2006; Froehlich 2007; Hess 2015; Regelski 2006; Shevock 2016), and the MayDay Group website has long housed audio clips of the most infamous institution iconoclast, Ivan Illich. Link: http://www.maydaygroup.org/resources/audio-clips Excited for the opportunity to smash icons, seeing the call for this colloquium, I provoked myself with these questions and others: what constitutes an institution? Are “familial relationships” institutionalized relationships? In this year’s colloquium, two provocateurs are placed together, and Kevin Shorner-Johnson’s work and mine breathe together (conspire) in interesting ways. My co-conspirator’s work and mine requires music educators to imagine possibilities. Mine begins with institutional critique. In music education scholarship, our institutions are criticized as slow to change (Regelski 2006), unfair (Bates 2013; Hess 2015), racist (Bradley 2006; Hess 2015; Koza 2008), patriarchal (Lamb 1996), exclusionary (Allsup 2016; Bates 2013; Froehlich 2007); they don’t promote lifelong participation (Regelski 2006), are placeless (Bates 2013), and, in my own analysis, uproot people from culture and soil (Shevock 2016). These institutions were established “to bring High Culture to the masses” (Regelski 2006, 4), wherein educators serve as gatekeepers (Allsup 2016; Froehlich 2007). University music education specialists “have colluded in allowing [an] outmoded model of limited musical training to be foisted on to aspiring music teachers” (Kratus 2007, 13). And our best students often take that limited thinking to guide their curricula. We narrow what musics and ways of being are possible in the minds of students, colluding in cultricide. Just as an educated citizenry remembers fewer languages, a music educated citizenry remembers fewer musics. In communities exposed to music education, elders realize certain musics are part of music education, and as a result stop teaching their children their songs. These lost songs embed local ways of being, of living sustainably in place. Certainly music education isn’t the only industrial institution culpable in cultricide—the recording industry also powerfully limits the possible. But music educators open students to the recording industry’s generalizable musics, and unknowingly belittle local musics and ways of being. But institutional critiques in music education scholarship seem to always recommend reform, rather than revolution … or as Froehlich (2007) recognized “the systemic conflict between my role as institutional gatekeeper on the one hand and my desire to instill significant change in institutional traditions on the other” (7). What type of change is significant, while continuing to serve the current institution? This type of change is change-within, rather than a full deconstruction or revolution. But after deinstitutionalization, reconstruction from a position of power may become possible. This is one reason why, in this paper, I am exploring possibilities for deinstitutionalization, and problematizing PRD, but not yet recommending a replacement. Importantly, music education as a discipline separates musical ways of being, because in most cultures musicking is integrated to other facets of being. The very existence of our discipline dissects what doesn’t exist as dissected. This may be because music education institutions are patriarchal. According to Lamb (1996), unlike feminist education, which is interdisciplinary, music education is technique based and specialized (125). Music education teaches an unobtainable ideology of perfecting performances, describing errors as poor musicianship (128). And music education attempts to transcend life (125-126), which can lead to us being environmentally unsustainable (see Shevock in press). In music education literature, institutions are most often defined specifically, not liberally to include non-institutionalized relationships like families. The possibility of “family” as an institution would be meaningfully different than “a family,” which is a lived in, experienced relationship. The institutionalized family seems to presuppose an institution constructing the ideals of a family. We feel like we belong to institutions like music education (see Froehlich 2007), but I would argue that family relationships are inescapable. We don’t feel like we belong to a family, we inescapably, and at times frustratingly, belong. Using the work of Wendell Berry, Bates (2013) makes an important distinction between communities and institutions, which is used in the current paper. I agree with Bates, who writes music educators “must always defer to those who reside in, love, and serve specific places and communities” (86; emphasis in original). However, I challenge those teachers who see their uprooting venture as service, because if that so-called service serves to degrade specific places and communities, to sever natural relationships for institutionalized ones, then it is not truly service to them, but to a global, neoliberal, technocratic, industrial society. A Thought on Anti-Racism. While focusing on each of the ways music education is unjust may distract from the flow of this paper, directing attention to one, anti-racism, can be illuminating. Established as they are in 19th Century industrial structures, music education institutions are racist, perpetuating inequity. Music education theorists have recommended anti-racism pedagogy, which can be defined as “an action-oriented, educational and political strategy for institutional and systemic change that addresses the issues of racism and the interlocking systems of oppression (sexism, classism, heterosexism, ableism)” (Bradley 2006, 25; endnote). Importantly, anti-racism is a model for critique and change within the existing institutional structures—it seems reform rather than deinstitutionalization. Important lessons can be taken from anti-racism in critiquing music education. Music educators often fail to recognize the power they have by their “institutionally recognized position of authority” (Hess 2015, 79), and our institutions enable violence against Black people (see 86). While all aspects of institutionalization can be understood as racist, Koza (2008) critiqued auditions, which are used as barriers to entry into the profession, writing, “restrictive notions of what constitutes musical competence, together with narrow definitions of legitimate musical knowledge, shut out potential teachers from already underrepresented culture groups” (146). Extending Koza’s critique, I think that for those people who do succeed in overcoming barriers to entry, something important can be lost—through displacing musical cultures, styles, and values so that preservice music teachers are able to function behind the walls of the institution—by becoming institutionalized professionals (see Shevock 2017). Institutionalization empties urban and rural places, displacing intellectuals cultivated by those communities. In this way, the university, through institutionalization of intellectually minded people, serves an anti-revolutionary purpose. Hollowed out rural and urban places, the social majorities/soil communities, become prey for industrial exploitation and pollution. And for those students leaving the social majorities to succeed at distant universities, even to win the game is to lose your once-rooted self—maybe even to lose important connections to culture. You risk becoming a packaged product, a music teacher, flung into someone else’s hometown, and packaging and selling previously non-monetized commons, living musical cultures—legitimizing some for sale and/or instruction. As Weil (2002) stated, “A tree whose roots are almost entirely eaten away falls at the first blow” (49). Uprooted intellectuals are one reason real change, and real diversity is difficult in the 21st Century. Shared Local Culture. Institutions result in a plethora of negative consequences, and because communities are distinct from institutions I listen to humble musics below my feet for wisdom. I listen to soil communities. Here, deinstitutionalized choices, “within the habitual reach of the actor … within a shared local culture” (Illich 1990, 1), are unearthed. Rachel Carson (2002) portrayed a soil community that “consists of a web of interwoven lives, each in some way related to the others—the living creatures depending on the soil, but the soil in turn a vital element of the earth only so long as this community within it flourishes” (56). This soil metaphor can be used to represent culture itself—cultures exist in particular places, in response to local environments and local definitions of living the good life. To the extent that institutions are hierarchical, racist, patriarchal, ableist, stratified—give power to some agents but not others—and propose generalizable solutions, institutionalized values are contradicted by living soil, and by soil-like human relationships. Soil expresses no unbreakable tenets and has no chairmen. In soil, diverse agents act according to their nature, and when one agent thrives at the expense of others, the soil’s fertility fails. In this way, the soil community can serve as a metaphor for the social majorities, those people in communities left behind and forgotten by global, neoliberal, industrial society. Gazing at another facet of the metaphor, people cultivating soil learn to cultivate it in their bioregion. They learn from the wisdom of others living sustainably in place. They listen to rooted, intergenerational, community wisdom. Because soil beings are vitally interconnected, a philosophy on soil resists modern individuality discourse: Esteva and Prakash (1998) write, “Decolonizing our minds means, among other things, resisting global pressures to think and act as individual selves: each separate from the other; each an industrial eater who has little or no connection with the soil on which s/he stands” (105-6). Music education institutions construct modern individuals—teachers who become industrial eaters disconnected from soil. As such, to smash institutional icons is to simultaneously deconstruct the modern individual. A paradox arises when I, an institutionalized music educator, ask, “Who deinstitutionalizes?” Institutionalized people who are critically conscious of the ways they have been institutionalized may or may not have the tools needed to deinstitutionalize institutional spaces—deinstitutionalization may require imagination we don’t have because we live in and are formed by institutionalization. To recognize this can be a step toward a deeper conscientization. Cultivating soil relationships is out of step with a society that has uprooted us from our communities and moved us to suburbs and college towns: these college towns, whether urban or rural, often define themselves as “in the middle of nowhere,” and this fictional nowhere being where the social majorities are rooted. But there is hope; the history of institutions is one of decay. If recent political life is any sign, many people are looking for deinstitutionalization, even if in the wrong places. The rise of Trump shows deinstitutionalization has its risks as well as potential rewards. Again, our leaving the social majorities has hollowed out soil communities, leaving them open to the abuses of industry while shielding us from reality. The paradox is that we, the institutionalized, must begin the work of just—less hierarchical, less patriarchal, less racist, less classist—deinstitutionalization. We begin by seeking those we have labeled musical dropouts. If soiled music education relationships have any hope of being rebuilt we uprooted professionals must begin with skepticism toward our current institutions, because we have the power to. If we try to deinstitutionalize, can we imagine a music education that is better? If we don’t, are we beholden to the ways our institutions remain invisibly hierarchical, patriarchal, racist, and classist? Do we propagate uprooting? No institutionalized relationships, including those in the MayDay Group, can be treated as sacred cows. Roots and a Soil Metaphor Three Sisters. This year, after many years of renting apartments without, I am renting a house with a yard. I have recovered—from roots and weeds and pernicious plastic landscaping fabric—a plot for a kitchen garden. In half of it I am experimenting with cover crops and a three sisters planting I initially learned about being used in Michelle Obama’s white house garden. Cover cropping builds soil, it protects the soil from drying out, and suppresses weeds. A month before last frost, I planted oilseed radishes, building soil structure. Their roots penetrate the soil deeply, leaving room for airways so that roots can breathe. I planted oats, which create hay protecting the ground from wind and rain. After chopping and dropping my cover, I planted into these a modern version of the three sisters, corn, peas (I don’t really like beans), and Hubbard squashes. These weren’t the more traditional varieties the first lady used, but were organic, heirloom varieties, which if do well I can seed save, disconnecting myself further from industrial food systems. The three sisters work together, corn providing climbing material, the wide leaves on the squash providing ground cover. While monoculture planting is one expression of what Vandana Shiva (2007) calls “the violence of reductionism” (26), co-planting in this way provides a link to feminist, pre-industrial and intergenerational wisdom. Discussions of pre-industrial wisdom cause me to remember old stories and other ways of life. The particular choice of three sisters in my garden reminds me of the stories of another three sisters: the Norns of Norse mythology, and a poem I wrote in 2005 and published to Elfwood: Three sisters sit, and time they spin, from time untold when times begin, On breadth they trod and length they make, and aeons weave, and lifetimes snake, An essence create then ending of life, to plait desire, and interlace strife, At times termination their fabric they flitch, and a new era they start to stich, The three sister’s labyrinth! (modified from personal notes; November 9, 2005) In mythology, the Norns stand above the gods as somewhat unknowable. I like to think these fates also stand beyond our institutions, and that by ending the life of our current industrial structures, we might initiate a new era. Endings can be painful or joyful occasions. By remembering the Norns, I remember structures beyond institutionalization and eras longer than a lifetime. The Need for Roots. I have used The Need for Roots to define rootedness as a philosophical concept. The need for roots is connected to ideas of nature, family, home, and soil (Fromm 1990, 38-60). Weil writes, “A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active, and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future” (Weil 2002, 43). This employment of roots as a placed and social metaphor provides certain dimensions that need to be understood to understand what a soil metaphor might provide music education. In Weil’s definition, participation in a community is rooted by being real, active, and natural. Real is connected to intergenerational wisdom. For instance, reality relates to a consciousness of a collective destiny, “transmitted from generation to generation” (8). Activeness might be thought of as agency, though Weil uses the term liberty. This “ability to choose” is limited by a community’s “rules imposed in the common interest” (12). Activeness then is agency within a lived-in community. The natural can be understood as connected to the natural environment (46). A naturally rooted person is connected to the environment; an actively rooted person acts within a community of people; and a really rooted person is connected to people and place intergenerationally. But rootedness isn’t an earned quality. Fromm (1990) writes, “all men are children of Mother Earth and have a right to be nourished by her, and to enjoy happiness without having to prove this right by achievement of any particular status” (57). If people are rooted really, actively, and naturally, the soil in this metaphor is that which nourishes the roots—culture, such as stories and songs passed down within the community, written and unwritten rules guiding personal interactions within a specific neighborhood, and the potentials and limits (of food, water, wildlife) for survival and sustainability within the bioregion. Since “Money destroys human roots wherever it is able to penetrate, by turning desire for gain into the sole motive” (Weil 2002, 44); music education can cause uprootedness by cultivating professional aspirations, such as for money, specialization and severing people from the natural world. Another distinctive challenge for music education is rootedness being bound to particular expectations for the future. We cultivate generalizable and professional ambitions, rather than community oriented, particular expectations (see Shevock 2016). Music education instills in one student the desire to become a music teacher, and since a small town may only be able to afford one music teacher, that means a real uprooting to, if the ideal holds, a rich suburban school district. Music education then instills in other students the desire to become professional musicians, which often involves living on tour buses or in the largest of cities such as New York or L.A. The final group of students becomes non-musicians, however much music they listen to and perform as amateurs. Are preservice music teachers educated to uncover their community’s particular expectations for the future, and cultivate those in their classrooms? Is Music Education a Need? Before we proceed with deinstitutionalization or reform, we should ask ourselves: is music a need? Is education a need? It seems both of these would have to be needs for music education to be a need. But, it is possible both are needs without music education also being a need. Schooling For music educators to cultivate a critical and sustainable praxis, understanding what schooling is seems important. Paul Goodman (2010) writes, “It is as though Society knows the repercussions that make its existence possible, but to the members of Society this knowledge has become unconscious. In this way is achieved the maximum of coercion by the easiest means” (22; emphasis in original). Music education institutions are coercive and we individuals in music education are often unconscious of these coercions. To make unconscious coercion explicit in music teacher education, we may ask ourselves and our preservice music teachers to consider what schools essentially are and whether schools are essentially good, bad, or neutral. In answering these questions, of base assumptions, teachers may believe schools are essentially good, in which case, honing a critical perspective may be unnecessary, and schools can be understood as sustainable institutions not in need of change. Yet another perspective arises from taking the assumption that schools are value-neutral spaces. From this perspective, these institutions would provide no negative pressures stopping teachers and students from realizing sustainable relationships. However, when teachers recognize that schools are essentially bad—coercive, unjust, hierarchical, uprooting, racist, unsustainable, sexist—then space opens for critical pedagogy, and the decision becomes whether to reform or deinstitutionalize schools. Technological Society Education A S Music Education Music education is coercive because it serves a function within education, which serves a function as part of technology in the most recent face of the industrial age (see Reimer Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 1: Music Education in Functional Perspective 1971, 19). At worst, music teachers are technology salesmen; peddling the latest, most profitable devices industry produces. This consumption-based music education didn’t end automatically with the demise of aesthetic rationalities for music education—consumption peddling merely moved from band instruments to turntables; choir robes to iPads. Additionally, the music-specific aspects of music education might very well embed music education in industrial technology in ways other educational disciplines are not, such as to the demands and values of the recording industry. In this way, more profitable musical genres, even where they are disconnected from culture and intergenerational wisdom, might be packaged and sold as social justice as is, without an analysis of essential critical issues of class, gender, race, and place. It may be easier to suggest reforms, and this is why our field suffers from PRD. We often write for an easy reform, and often one that is basically ignored by those most embedded in the institution. Institutional leaders learn to talk the talk without ever considering walking the walk. They’ve become institutional leaders for a reason—the game they play is changing the least to satisfy the most of their constituents. And most of their constituents aren’t conscientized. Finding real alternatives is difficult. Embedded in the institution, we are blinded to many injustices it would be easy to see without our professional ties. As Everett Reimer (1971) noted, “Alternatives to school, as opposed to mere reform, require going beyond the experiences of individuals to an analysis of the essential characteristics of schools” (10). Schooling is a social construct that can be understood by its essential structure. But what are the essential aspects of this construct? Are age-specific classrooms, separation of children from families behind the walls of a school, grading, and separation of knowledge into disciplines essential aspects of schooling? Are classism, patriarchy, racism, and ableism? Unschooling Where might music educators look to uncover less institutionalized schooling? Among six functions Gatto (2010) observed that schools serve, adjustment, and the diagnostic/differentiating/selective functions seem pertinent to music education. By adjustment, Gatto means establishing “fixed habits of reaction to authority” (xviii). Students learn not to be free and autonomous, but to stand in lines, sit in rows, to be quiet, and to keep their hands to themselves. An adjustment function of music education might be curtailing instrument exploration with knowing when to and when not to make sound—always dictated by the teacher. These adjustment functions don’t serve the rationality of a community, but of the institution. One cannot have 20 students playing trumpets, trombones, tubas, and drums at once, following their own desires. In the diagnostic/differentiating/selective functions, students are analyzed mathematically to decide if they are to be musicians or non-musicians, sorted into those categories, and kept from students who are different—non-musicians are put in general music classes, and musicians in band, orchestra, or choir. “Schools are meant to tag the unfit—with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments—clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes” (xix). In full disclosure, my wife and I were both in the university marching and concert bands. Perhaps homeschooling literature might provide insights for institutionalized music educators. After all, homeschoolers might effectively skirt adjustment and the diagnostic/differentiating/selective functions of school. Homeschooling can be agentic for many families. As Hewitt (2014) wrote while observing his children learn in nature, “It is at once liberating, daunting, exciting, and, it must be said, occasionally frightening to realize the extent to which my world is in my hands. I am freer than I was told as a child; I am freer than I was led to believe” (8). Homeschooling is unconventional for a reason—most families want schooling because schooling is what’s done, at least now, in their community. In modern society, education is a universal church and has become a common goal (see Illich 2012). Illich (2012) writes, “Puerto Rico has been schooled. … The desire for education has actually given way to the compulsion of schooling. Puerto Rico has adopted a new religion. Its doctrine is that education is a product of the school, a product which can be defined by numbers” (125). Hewitt continues, “Having chosen such an unconventional path in both the manner we educate our sons and the way we pass our days, growing most of our food and remaining close to our home, there are times it feels to me as if my family’s voice is lost in the crowd, and it can occasionally feel as if we occupy a lonely space … in a broader cultural sense of living out-of-step with so many common goals and expectations” (21). What can music educators learn from an analysis of homeschoolers? Galumphing in the Garden I use Christopher Small’s (1998) book, Musicking, in my Intro to Western Music class. Each semester, reading the Postlude, I am concerned. Small concludes, “all normally endowed human beings are born with the gift of musicking” (207) and music exists “in most traditional societies” (208), but also that musics “have to be cultivated” (207), for instance, in schools. He explains, “what no longer exists in industrial societies is that broader social context in which performance, as well as listening, is constantly taught and musicking is encouraged as an important social activity for every single member of society” (207). I find these statements paradoxical because I find it difficult to accept that school, which is embedded in industrial society, can effectively make exist what no longer exists due to industrial societies, which school is part of. As industrial society, school seems to be the problem, and Small touches upon this a bit. But he fails to arrive at what I see as the logical conclusion, that traditional societies should be cultivated and emulated rather than more reformed industrial music education. If musics thrive in cultures untouched by music education, perhaps studying no-till farming practices will help provide insight into our current predicament. Japanese farmer and philosopher, Masanobu Fukuoka (2009) developed a no-till farming method that’s still popular. In this method, tilling is avoided because it destroys the soil community. Crops are started below the previous crops, and various bugs and birds are attracted to the farm. These ideas served as a foundation for the current permaculture movement, which re-creates farms as natural ecosystems … as farm-forests. Fukuoka was critical of university and industry generated farming techniques: No matter how hard people try, they cannot improve upon naturally grown fruits and vegetables. Produce grown in an unnatural way satisfies people’s fleeting desires but weakens the human body and alters the body chemistry so that it is dependent upon such foods. When this happens, vitamin supplements and medicines become necessary. This situation only creates hardships for the farmer and suffering for the consumer. (98) Using a soil metaphor for music education, I wonder to what extend this statement is also true for music education, especially as instituted in universities and public schools? Playfully, I transform Fukuoka’s idea: No matter how hard people try, they cannot improve upon naturally grown musical cultures. Musics grown in an unnatural way satisfies people’s fleeting desires but weakens the culture and alters the musicker so that s/he is dependent upon music education institutions. When this happens, more music education becomes necessary. This situation only creates hardships for the musician and suffering for the consumer. Deinstitutionalizing as an Imaginary Practice Imagining deinstitutionalization—asking, “Without this institutions what possibilities open?”—may be possible in music education. Music educators have historically viewed themselves on the periphery of education, as well as music. To exemplify, unlike reading and math education, music education hasn’t been as part of today’s central reform movement, standardized testing. And during college, many music educators have the experience of being viewed as less musical than performance majors simply as a result of majoring in music education. And yet we are hired and paid for by institutions, even if just to provide prep periods and proctor standardized tests. This outsider-insider perspective might provide unique opportunities for imaginary practice. If your school currently didn’t have general music, band, orchestra, and choir, what music learning opportunities might you facilitate? If your school didn’t have periods, but rather a student might spend 8 hours of one day with you this week, and an hour next, how might you modify your teaching practice? If you didn’t have to stay inside, what non-human musics might diversify your pedagogy? What if we refused both speed and efficiency, and embraced rather what my co-conspirator Kevin Shorner-Johnson calls sinful idleness? Do we have to teach this music so efficiently? What instruments might your students build in a local park, given the afternoon for leisure? Who in the community might co-teach with you? What unexpected learning might occur? What if you refused to give grades—and I don’t mean merely giving everybody an “A,” which not only reinforces the existence of grades but devalues music education within the current unjust hierarchy? What if your school didn’t give grades at all? Possibilities for Deinstitutionaled Alternatives If our imagined deinstitutionalized music education looks different than our current institutions, what can we do to end those injustices? Should there be music education sub-disciplines that should end today? Aware of the institutionalization music industry dollars bring to indoctrinate our students to the values of industrial society, are there emerging practices we shouldn’t pursue and uprooting value systems we shouldn’t strengthen? At least for the time being, we might have to live within our institutions as if they deinstitutionalized. This follow’s Goodman’s (2010) maxim, “Free action is to live in present society as though it were a natural society” (26; emphasis in original). This may require music educators practicing small acts of defiance against their institutions. Scott (2012) uses the phrase “anarchist calisthenics”—breaking small, irrational laws every day. “Quiet, anonymous, and often complicitous, lawbreaking and disobedience may well be the historically preferred mode of political action for peasant and subaltern classes, for whom open defiance is too dangerous” (11). Anarchist calisthenics has a long history, likely going back to the formation of the first human institutions, through poaching on enclosed commons during the middle ages, and including jaywalking today. But can music education survive deinstitutionalized? That question comes down to whether an anarchist society is possible. That is, are anarchist principles such as “autonomy, voluntary association, self-organization, mutual aid, [and] direct democracy” (Graeber 2004, 2) possible in deinstitutionalized institutions (is this a paradox?) when society at large is institutionalized, coercive, polluting, classist, racist, and patriarchal? Was Goodman being unreasonably idealistic when he said we could live as if we were free? What would a deinstitutionalized MayDay Group look like? The anarchist project is threefold: it “sets out to begin creating the institutions of a new society ‘within the shell of the old,’ to expose, subvert, and undermine structures of domination but always, while doing so, proceeding in a democratic fashion, a manner which itself demonstrates those structures are unnecessary” (Graber 2004, 7). Even while NAfME may be moving toward more institutionalization, might MayDay Group provide a deinstitutionalized alternative; one based on anarchist principles; one thriving within the shell of our current institutionalized society; but subverting and undermining all of music education’s structures of domination, while demonstrating those structures are unnecessary? Or will we reinforce those anti-democratic structures, merely replacing NAfME’s powerful insiders with other insiders? Can we avoid vanguardism? Avoiding Premature Reconstruction Disorder. Returning to Music Educated and Uprooted, I concluded my autoethnography by recommending Foxfire teaching practices (Shevock 2016). These were developed in rural Georgia and included making “connections between the classroom work, the surrounding communities, and the world beyond” (Starnes and Carone 2002, iv). These connections might provide an opening for rerooting music education on soil, but I have come to think my quick answer to the problem of music education as uprooting was premature. At best, being informed by Foxfire teaching practices is a reform action, but reform might preclude us from seeing possibilities for revolutionary change—that is, deinstitutionalizing music education and starting from scratch. To reform is to automatically continue to do something in schools, with detained people, likely even giving grades and continuing with institutional structures. Does a music education that makes students turn their family and homes into objects of analysis really cease to be uprooting? Does it cease to construct them into homo educandus musicae, end the myth of music scarcity, and stop the longing for (sub)urbanization? When I read my conclusion, over and over, I become more and more skeptical. PRD is problematic because it moderates our ability to imagine change. It stops our theorizing at “good enough,” and may even satiate our revolutionary aims with reforms that fall short of challenging the challenges at the root of music education. Deinstitutionalization is Revolutionary … and, a Provocation Critical theorists can recommend actions which are reforms of the current system, or which are revolutionary, ending the current institutional structures and creating newer ways of being. In this paper, I put forth an argument that music education scholars’ practice of always requiring some action at the end of critical papers represents PRD—premature reconstruction disorder. In my analysis, perhaps I leaned too heavily on some theorists and too lightly on others. For instance, Fromm’s insights into Marxist Freudian psychoanalysis might have opened some doorways I did not with the current paper, especially in understanding this need to offer up reforms instead of demanding revolution is a disorder. The current paper stands though as an unfinished provocation. And I ask for your wisdom. If revolutionary change requires deinstitutionalization of music education, and if reform merely hides anew the ways our institution is unjust, is there space for revolutionary deinstitutionalization within the MayDay Group?  References Allsup, Randall Everett. 2016. Remixing the Classroom: Toward an Open Philosophy of Music Education. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 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