On Friday 6th September, 2008, Babelia, the literary supplement of the Spanish daily newspaper El País, published an interview with Daniel Pennac, today’s best-known French novelist. At no point is music mentioned, but it is not difficult to draw similarities between the substance of the interview and a situation with which we are all too familiar at Musikeon, especially in our teaching department. The interview deals with Pennac’s latest book, Chagrin d’école (“School sickness”) and practically the whole text has to do, in one way or another, with education, a subject on which Pennac, who for many years was a secondary school teacher, has first-hand knowledge.
Commenting on the constant criticism levelled at the world of education, Pennac says, “It can all be summed up in the hackneyed contention that students lack a solid foundation. In other words, “It’s not my fault!” The primary school teacher complains about nursery school and that parents are not involved in the education of their children, while the secondary school teacher believes that it is the primary school which is at fault. When the schoolchildren finally pass their secondary school exams, they still lack a solid foundation and their university teachers complain about the standards of their new students. Parents blame the teachers, teachers blame the Ministry of Education, and the Ministry blames May 1968 or some other culprit. The blame is always laid at somebody else’s door! It is all part of a global process of finding a scapegoat which prevents any serious discussion and, more importantly, prevents what is wrong being put right. Change “primary” por “elementary grade”; “secondary” for “intermediate grade” (or “professional training”, or whatever); and “university” for “superior grade”, and the whole argument fits what we hear on a daily basis about the teaching of music like a glove. How often do we hear complaints, sweeping complaints that go beyond the strictly musical and seem to be fuelled, above all, by fear of the changes that are all around us. As Octavi Martí, the author of the article, rightly observes, “That fear is fuelled by power, by the Press, by society at large. Somebody has to bear the blame, and every level of the education process has found its culprit: the others”.
Many other statements by Pennac can easily be applied to the field of music, such as when he criticises an education system which aims to produce mature and aware individuals on the basis of a “quantitative and chronological” logic, grounded in repetition and the accumulation of information, which fails when it comes to inspiring a love of what is studied. There is an equally familiar ring to his words referring to “the kind of forensic analyses that destroy all passion,” ironically posing the question, “Who wants to make love to a corpse?” What really strikes a chord, though, is the moent during the interview when Pennac emotionally recalls his own student years, evoking the memory of a bungling student who was always bottom of the class. He finally managed to get out the rut thanks to the new-found self-esteem he owed to the love of a girl he met at a drama course and, above all, to the intuition of his French language teacher, who responded to that “hopeless adolescent who was incapable of grasping the most elementary rules of grammar and spelling” with a genius stroke of intuition. “He let me off tests and exams, but he told me to go and write a novel. It was a new and extraordinary responsibility”. Today, in view of Pennac’s millions of books sold all over the world, it is easy to say that his teacher made the right decision. But how many other situations are there in which teachers need precisely that ability to adapt to the circumstances of each student and come up with solutions to build confidence, and make the student believe in his or her potential, helping them on the road to self-knowledge? That is what teaching is all about - educating people and believing in the future.

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