Philosophic Foundations of

Education

David Whitwell

Philosophic Foundations of

Education

OTHER BOOKS BY DAVID WHITWELL

Philosophic Foundations of EducationFoundations of Music EducationMusic Education of the Future

The Sousa Oral History ProjectThe Longy Club 1900–1917

The History and Literature of the Wind Band and Wind Ensemble SeriesA Concise History of the Wind Band

Volume 1 The Wind Band and Wind Ensemble Before 1500Volume 2 The Renaissance Wind Band and Wind Ensemble

Volume 3 The Baroque Wind Band and Wind EnsembleVolume 4 The Wind Band and Wind Ensemble of the Classic Period (1750–1800)

Volume 5 The Nineteenth-Century Wind Band and Wind Ensemble

For a complete list of the works of David Whitwell visit:whitwellbooks.com

David Whitwell

Philosophic Foundations of

Education

EDITED BY CRAIG DABELSTEIN

WHITWELL PUBLISHING • AUSTIN, TEXAS, USA

Philosophic Foundations of EducationDavid WhitwellEdited by Craig Dabelsteinwww.whitwellbooks.com

Whitwell Publishing815-A Brazos Street #491Austin, Texas, USAwww.whitwellpublishing.com

Copyright © David Whitwell 2011All rights reserved

Composed in Bembo BookPublished in the United States of America

Philosophic Foundations of Education (pdf) isbn 978-1-936512-01-0

Foreword vii

Preface xi

1 Why the Church Closed the Schools 1

2 Early Renaissance Views on Education 9

3 Views on Education in Sixteenth-Century Italy 25

4 Montaigne on Education 37

5 Vives on Education 47

6 Erasmus on Education 61

7 Views on Education in Sixteenth-Century Germany 75

8 Views on Education in Sixteenth-Century England 87

9 Views on Education in Baroque France 99

10 Jacobean Philosophers on Education 109

11 Restoration Philosophers on Education 121

Illustrations 133

About the Author 135

Contents

Foreword

Over the years it has gradually dawned on me how little we teachers know about our own profession. I am not talking about skills such as classroom management, assessment, behav-iour management, curriculum development or the myriad other activities in which the modern educator is proficient. I am talking about the history of teaching, and how the world-wide education system developed to its current state.

As a conservatorium music student, it was compulsory for me to study music history for two years: two thousand years of music history. This was a one-eyed, western Classical view no doubt, but at least it was something. However, as an educa-tion student, there was almost no historical information taught to students other than the small amount that was relevant to the study of modern learning theories such as those of Piaget, Vygotsky, and Gardner. The problem is, these are theories that were developed only in the past one hundred years. What was teaching like for the 1,900 years before that?

People study history to better understand the present. People study history to learn and benefit from the mistakes of others. Why don’t education degree programs include a course on the historical development of education so that beginning teachers can get an understanding of why modern education is like it is, and to help inexperienced teachers from making mistakes that have been made before? What did the ancient Egyptians think about teaching? What about the great philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle? There have been 263 Catholic Popes since 30 ad. Did any of them discuss education? What has been the Church’s position on the education of children? What teaching methods have been used for the previous two thousand years? How was behaviour controlled? (We could all use more tips on controlling behaviour!) The Renaissance produced some of the greatest works of art and literature. What was being taught to children during this time of such creative inspiration?

Reading this collection of essays by Dr. David Whitwell, I was struck by the thought that both the best and worst parts of our profession have been around for hundreds, if not thou-sands, of years. Many of the high ideals we aspire to, and on

viii Philosophic Foundations of Education

which we base our individual teaching philosophies, were expounded by the philosophers of ancient Greece. Similarly, the worst aspects of our profession, such as corporal punish-ment, have also been around for a long time and we have still not eradicated them.

Some of the primary sources Dr. Whitwell quotes in these pages paint an extremely bleak and terrifying picture of what early schools were like, including the physical and psychologi-cal mistreatment of students, and yet, centuries later, when even dog and horse trainers use positive reinforcement, there are still schools around the world where corporal punishment is used under the cloak of a ‘behaviour management strat-egy’. Montaigne is one of those in these pages who saw the error of corporal punishment more than four hundred years ago. Roger Ascham and John Locke also criticised the use of corporal punishment in education. Poland became the first country to ban corporal punishment from schools in 1783 and yet my own high school was still handing out the cane during the 1980s. To this day, the argument over the use of violence, or threat thereof, as a means of modifying behaviour goes on. Few countries have outlawed corporal punishment from their government run and privately owned schools entirely. Are we ignorant or just slow learners?

Another theme in these pages is the cultural and economic status of the teaching profession. From these sources it appears that teachers have never been held in high esteem by the public, or treated with the respect afforded other members of society, or paid a sum which reflects the importance of what they do. In the 1300s Francesco Petrarch said, ‘Let them teach who can do nothing better’—a precursor of George Bernard Shaw’s, ‘He who can, does; he who cannot, teaches.’ (Man and Superman, 1903) Many of the world’s greatest thinkers, included in these pages, have tried to reverse this trend and convince people of the importance of teachers and education; however, the social status of teachers remains below many other professions. Few parents nowadays would articulate Petrarch’s or Shaw’s disrespect towards their child’s teachers, however, many take only a limited interest in their child’s schooling. Roger Asham’s reflection, in the mid-1500s, that most pay the man who looks after their horses more than the man who teaches their children seems just as relevant nearly

ix

five hundred years later: people spend more money on cars, hobbies and holidays than on their children’s education. Many parents do not even know the names of their child’s teachers, let alone the teacher’s qualifications or experience.

The education field worldwide is populated by enthusiastic and dedicated teachers who are constantly trying to improve our practice and the outcomes for our students, and I would guess that most universities take their education degree pro-grams seriously. However, teachers spend their first three or four years at university studying their preferred subject. They then spend just one year studying to become a teacher, learn-ing most things ‘on the job’, and in which trial and error plays a big part. I inwardly wince when I think back to all those students who I ‘taught’ while I was struggling to learn how to teach effectively. Our children’s lives are too important to be left in the hands of teachers who are learning on the job. Can you imagine a school where the teachers have spent three years or more learning how to teach ... ? Teaching is a profession in which experience matters.

It is not the role of schools to produce engineers, doctors, politicians, lawyers or musicians. It is the role of schools to equip students to negotiate life, and we do that by teaching different subject areas. As a music teacher, I do not try to create musicians: I try to create smart, happy, well-adjusted people and I do it through teaching the beauty of music. The book you are about to read has made me a better teacher. I hope it will do the same for you.

Craig DabelsteinBrisbane, 2010

Preface

During the course of my own graduate studies at the Catholic University of America in Washington dc, I elected to take a course offered by their drama department called ‘Drama Criti-cism.’ I was interested in this because both drama and music have a written form and a performance form which is subject to interpretation by the performer.

The professor for this course was a brilliant young Jesuit who began with detailed analysis of the theorie of the drama in Aristotle and Horace. The issue in contrasting these two men, representatives respectively of Tragedy and Epic the-ater, was at heart a philosophical contrast between the val-ues of aesthetic performance and entertainment. The course continued to study these contrasting philosophies in leading playwrights until the semester’s time ran out (somewhere in the Renaissance).

This course really ‘hit home’ with me because I had long since wondered why orchestral concerts were aesthetic events while band concerts were entertainment events. A typical university band concert in the 1950s consisted of comedy music (‘The One-Armed Paper Hanger’), trumpet trios, multiple marches, a variety of soloists and brief excerpts of orchestral music (the ‘coda’ of Strauss’ Death and Transfiguration). I could not understand why band conductors wanted to wear uniforms when they conducted when their colleagues of the orchestra wore those elegant sets of tails. And, of course, as a student player in these groups I do not recall ever being ‘moved’ by performing in a band.

I have returned to this theme throughout my career as a conductor and have for fifty years attempted in every way possible to convince my colleagues to leave the entertain-ment business and become conductors of aesthetic music. I have never understood why a public high school or a public university should be expected to provide entertainment for the public when at no time has the public suffered for lack of entertainment. During my career I have seen some progress in the improvement of the repertoire. But band conductors themselves, almost always having grown up in the band busi-

xii Philosophic Foundations of Education

ness from an early age, still find it very difficult to separate themselves from the old tradition of entertaining their students and the public. Many do not yet understand that the goal in classical music is not to ‘please,’ but catharsis.

Later on in my career there came a time when my own music department at the California State University at North-ridge decided to completely reconstruct its curriculum in music. Having noticed over the years that no music depart-ment offered a genuine course in the aesthetics of music, I determined to have such a course added to the curriculum. It was only then that I discovered that our very large pub-lic library had virtually nothing on the shelves dealing with aesthetics in music. A few books with similar titles had noth-ing to do with aesthetics but were instead disguised attempts to justify contemporary music. Thus I felt compelled to begin reading and writing on this subject myself.

In reading the works of earlier philosophers one immedi-ately finds them struggling with issues familiar to us today, such as the roles Reason and Experience play in our lives, the role of Emotion in our thinking and the value we assign to public opinion. In struggling with such topics early philoso-phers became entangled with issues of the Church and inevi-tably the role played by education. It was in this vortex of competing ideas and interests that music education had to seek its place.

The purpose of this volume is to provide the reader with a functional perspective on the philosophical foundations of earlier education in general. Following volumes will provide the reader with a detailed study of music education’s place in that broader educational framework and then help the reader develop his own philosophical convictions about music educa-tion for the future.

Finally, I wish to acknowledge the many contributions of Craig Dabelstein in making this volume available to the public.

David WhitwellAustin, 2010

[The] wretched Aristotle, who taught [the heretics] dialectic, that art of building up and demolishing, so protean in statement, so far-fetched in conjecture, so unyielding in controversy, so productive of disputes; self-stultifying, since it is ever handling questions but never settling anything.Tertullian (155–230 ad)

From our distant perspective, many people assume that the new Church was founded immediately after the death of Christ and grew in a steady, uninterrupted fashion until the present day. Actually, during the first three centuries, it was a church divided on many fronts. There were many branches, or factions, so many that one writer in the year 187 ad counted twenty and a writer in 384 ad found eighty.1 Certainly it was clear by the fourth century that the Roman Church would be the survivor and it established its authority in 367 ad when Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria, and various committees, selected the books which were to comprise the New Testa-ment, keeping sacred books which supported their argument and casting into oblivion those which did not.

It must have also been very difficult, at first, to maintain discipline among the early Christians, especially as the antici-pated reappearance of Christ failed to occur. An anonymous poem of the early second century, ‘The Shepherd of Hermas,’ complains that one is beginning to see among Christians the re-emergence of pagan customs, including rouge, dyed hair, painted eyelids, drunkenness, avarice, and adultery.2

It was against this background, then, that the early Church leaders and philosophers struggled to create the Church as we know it. In order to facilitate the growth of the new religion, the early Church Fathers had two paramount challenges. First, they had to finally overcome a ‘pagan’ intellectual environ-ment which had roots one thousand years old. Hence they immediately commenced their attack on education, philoso-phy, poetry, music and all forms of entertainment known to their contemporaries—in short, everything we think of as the glorious traditions of ancient Greek and Roman culture. And, in the end, the Church was successful; the Church won! Her victory we call today, ‘The Dark Ages.’

It was in this spirit of eliminating the pagan past that we find the quotation at the top of this essay by Tertullian. Basi-cally, both his and the Roman Church’s view was: We, not

1 Why the Church Closed the Schools

1 Will Durant, Caesar and Christ (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1944), 616.

2 Quoted in ibid., 599.

Triumph of Christianity by Tommaso Laureti (1530–1602), Sala di Costantino, Vatican Palace

2 Philosophic Foundations of Education

the philosophers of the past, will provide your philosophy; we will tell you what to think. This is what Tertullian meant when he wrote,

What is there in common between Athens and Jerusalem? What between the Academy and the Church? What between heretics and Christians? … Away with all projects for a ‘Stoic,’ a ‘Platonic’ or a ‘dia-lectic’ Christianity! After Christ Jesus we desire no subtle theories, no acute inquires after the gospel.3

On the other hand, there were some early Church fathers who were reluctant to give up the treasures of Greek philoso-phy. Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150–216), for example, thought the Greek philosophers were also inspired by God and that their works were put in place to make people ready for Chris-tianity. Philosophy, he said, was a ‘schoolmaster’ to bring the Greek mind to Christ.

These two schools of thought about what to do with ‘pagan’ philosophy must have been the spring board for much debate. Taking sides against the ancient Greek philosophy, we see St. Jerome (347–420 ad) concerned about priests themselves reading ‘the philosophers, the orators, the poets,’ for fear it would set an example for the ‘weak.’4 He admits he reads the philosophers and suggests that ‘if we find anything useful in them, we apply it to our own doctrine.’ But the other litera-ture, anything having to do with idols, love, or secular things, these he says must be cut off like finger nails. And certainly, he says, priests should not read poetry or comedies, which only children read, and then because they are forced to in school.

But as it is, we see even priests of God slighting the Gospels and the prophets, reading comedies, reciting love passages from bucolic verse, cherishing Virgil and voluntarily making themselves guilty of that which in the case of children is done under compulsion.

St. John Chrysostom (349–407 ad) argues for a similarly limited acceptance of philosophy. Philosophy is good, he says, as long as its our philosophy!

Philosophy is a very good thing—I mean, of course our philosophy. Pagan philosophy, to be sure, is merely talk and fables, and not even the fables themselves possess any trace of true wisdom. In fact, all their teachings are uttered with a view to worldly repute.5

4 St. Jerome, ‘Letter to Damasus,’ trans., Charles C. Mierow in The Letters of St. Jerome (Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1963), I, 118.

5 St. John Chrysostom, ‘Commentary on Saint John,’ trans., Sister Thomas Aquinas Goggin (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1960), 179.

Saint Jerome (1606) by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio

Quintus Florens Tertullian (155–230 AD), church father and theologian

3 Tertullian, De praescriptione haereticorum, vii, in Henry Bettenson, ed., Documents of the Christian Church, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 6.

3

Speaking for the more liberal views, the humble St. Basil (329–379 ad) gives subtle, indirect, advice to welcome past teaching:

One should receive instruction modestly and teach graciously. If he has learned anything from another, he should not conceal the fact after the manner of degraded wives who palm off as belonging to their husbands their baseborn children, but he should candidly declare the father of his idea.6

The ideas of Plato and Aristotle had not completely died out by the fourth century, being preserved in a few schools dedi-cated to traditional ‘pagan’ philosophy. In particular, Athens had a university of sorts which was supported even by the Christian emperor, Constantine. The final important philoso-pher in the ancient tradition was Libanius, born in 314, whose students included such important future Church leaders as St. Basil and St. John Chrysostom. One who wanted to study with Libanius, but was not allowed to, was the young man who became the Emperor Julian, reigning 361–363 ad. Ban-ished to Athens, he enjoyed an introduction to the teachings of the ancient philosophers. He, himself, defined philosophy as follows:

In philosophy the end and the beginning are one, namely, to know oneself and to become like the gods. That is to say, the first principle is self-knowledge, and the end of conduct is the resemblance to the higher powers.7

Even as emperor, his private passion remained books and philosophy and a wish to restore the ancient cults. If we can believe his self-portrait, even his appearance resembled the stereotype pagan philosopher which the Church so often ridiculed.

Though nature did not make my face any too handsome, nor give it the bloom of youth, I myself out of sheer perversity added to it this long beard … I put up with the lice that scamper about in it as though it were a thicket for wild beasts … My head is disheveled; I seldom cut my hair or my nails, and my fingers are nearly always black with ink.8

The great Augustine (354–430 ad) follows the now official Roman Church view in dismissing ‘pagan’ philosophy. In one place he mentions reading the Hortensius of Cicero,9 of whom

6 St. Basil, ‘Letter to Gregory of Nazianzus,’ in Letters of Saint Basil, trans., Sister Agnes Way (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1951), I, 9.

7 Julian, ‘To the Cynic Heracleios,’ in The Works of the Emperor Julian, trans., Wilmer Wright (London: Heinemann, 1913), II, 127.

8 Misopogon, 338B

9 The Confessions, Book III.

4 Philosophic Foundations of Education

he makes the interesting observation, ‘whose language almost all admire, not so his heart.’ In condemning earlier philosophy, he quotes from Colossians 2:8.

But the love of wisdom is in Greek called ‘philosophy,’ with which that book inflamed me. Some there be that seduce through philosophy, under a great, and smooth, and honorable name coloring and disguising their own errors: and almost all who in that and former ages were such, are in that book censured and set forth: there also is made plain that wholesome advice of Thy Spirit,

See to it that no one makes a prey of you by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ.

Regarding his own education in the liberal arts, including music, Augustine diminishes the philosophies of the past by stating that in his youth he studied and understood them all without the benefit of a teacher.

Whatever was written, either on rhetoric, or logic, geometry, music, and arithmetic, by myself without much difficulty or any instructor, I understood.10

Understanding the liberal arts was, for the fourth century Church fathers, somewhat of an irrelevant concept. Faith was what mattered. Only later did some Church philosophers come to believe that the liberal arts might have a value in helping the Christian understand this message. For Augustine, study of the liberal arts had only a limited value.

You must return to those verses, for instruction in the liberal arts, if only it is moderate and concise, produces devotees more alert and stead-fast and better equipped for embracing truth.11

As implied in this quotation by Augustine, the Church had now not only dismissed ancient philosophy, but also all the liberal arts. This is nowhere more clear than in a letter by Pope Gregory (540–604 ad), during whose lifetime the Greek schools were closed, to Desiderius, the Bishop of Vienne, criti-cizing him for teaching grammar.

A report has reached us which we cannot mention without a blush, that thou expoundest grammar to certain friends; whereat we are so offended and filled with scorn that our former opinion of thee is turned to mourning and sorrow.12

11 Divine Providence and the Problem of Evil, trans., Ludwig Schopp (New York: CIMA Publishing Co.), 261.

12 Quoted in Nan Cooke Carpenter, Music in the Medieval and Renaissance Universities (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958), 15.

St Jerome Appearing to St Augustine by Giovanni di Paolo, ca. 1456

10 ibid., Book IV.

St Augustine Teaching in Rome (scene 6, south wall), 1464–65, Fresco by Benozzo Gozzoli, Apsidal chapel, Sant’Agostino, San Gimignano

5

13 An extraordinarily vivid account of these people can be found in Procopius, The Secret History (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981).

Most historians take the date of 475 ad as the beginning of the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, a date by which time the old empire was divided, with emperors in both Rome and Constantinople. The history for the next seventy-five years is very complicated, but the leading figures were a Western general, Odoacer, who proclaimed himself king of Italy and Zeno who was the Eastern, or Byzantine, emperor in Constantinople. Odoacer is eventually replaced with a rare talent, Theodoric, for whom both Boethius and Cassiodorus, names well-known to musicians today, were employed.

In the East, Zeno was followed by Justin I and then by his nephew Justinian and his prostitute-actress-wife, Theodora.13 Justinian achieved what no other Byzantine Emperor had before or ever would again after him, the conquering of the city of Rome itself. But by this time little was left of the West-ern part of the Empire, as tribes of Goths, Franks, and even Saxons in the north were claiming the ancient Roman lands.

We have an eye-witness description of the city during the period of this first emperor of the sixth century, Justinian, who was certainly one of the strangest of all Roman emper-ors. He lived and dressed like a monk, fasting, praying, and discussing philosophy. As he wanted to become a musician and poet, we must assume his neglect of the educational institu-tions reported here was due more to his inclination to hoard money (he once increased his income by putting ashes in the peasants’ bread).

[Justinian] caused doctors and teachers of gentlemen’s sons to go short of the elementary necessities of life. For the free rations which earlier emperors ordered to be issued to members of these professions Justin-ian took away altogether. Moreover, the whole of the revenues which all the municipalities had raised locally for communal purposes and for entertainments he took over and shamelessly pooled with the revenues of the central government. From then on doctors and teachers counted for nothing: no one was now in a position to plan any public building projects; no lamps were lit in the streets of the cities; and there was nothing else to make life pleasant for the citizens. Theaters, hippo-dromes, and circuses were almost all shut … Both in private and in public there was grief and dejection, as if yet another visitation from heaven had struck them, and all laughter had gone out of life.14 14 ibid., 169.

6 Philosophic Foundations of Education

As Gibbon points out, it was this Christian emperor who also closed the schools of Athens and Alexandria.

Justinian suppressed the schools of Athens and the consulship of Rome, which had given so many sages and heroes to mankind …

The Gothic arms were less fatal to the schools of Athens than the establishment of a new religion, whose ministers superseded the exercise of reason, resolved every question by an article of faith, and condemned the infidel or skeptic to eternal flames.15

But this was only the last chapter of a longer story. One aspect of the Church’s effort to create a new kind of Roman citizen was the elimination of those who did not fit the model. Thus,

a wave of violent attacks against heretics, Jews, and pagans swept the region, with many assaults incited or winked at by bishops and perpe-trated by zealous monks determined to ‘purify’ their society.16

One story will perhaps represent hundreds of thousands. There was a daughter of a well-known Alexandrian mathema-tician named Hypatia, who by ca. 415 ad had established her own school of philosophy. She was a beloved person, famous for her virtue and wisdom, and her school was attended by distinguished persons. Following an attack by the Christians on a large and ancient Jewish population in Alexandria during which many residents were murdered, the rumor was spread that Hypatia had conspired to undermine the archbishop’s authority. Consequently, while taking an evening walk, a group of Christians seized her and carried her to a nearby church where they stripped off her clothes, tortured her to death, dismembered her body and burned the pieces.

The tragic story of Hypatia serves as a symbol of just how powerless the ancient philosophies were in the face of the Church. In fact, it was during the life of Hypatia, that Theophilus, Archbishop of Alexandria (d. 412 ad) set out to destroy all the ancient manuscripts he could find.

The ‘Dark Ages,’ might be dated from the year 529 ad when Justinian closed the Platonic Academy in Athens. However, due to the fear of the Christian church, so well justified in the example of Hypatia, many teachers had already left the West seeking safer residences in the East. Their taking copies of the ancient Greek works with them was the first step by which

16 Richard Rubenstein, Aristotle’s Children (New York: Harcourt Books, 2003), 70.

15 Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Philadelphia: Coates), III, 466ff.

7

17 Letter to ‘the Illustrious Consularis,’ III, lii, in Variae, trans., Thomas Hodgkin (London: Frowde, 1886).

18 Gibbon, op. cit., IV, 587.

these works survived in Arab translations, which would then centuries later be retranslated into the Western tongues. Their later reintroduction to the West gave the Church a tremendous headache, for their edifice built on Faith had now to defend itself against the world of Reason they had tried to destroy.

In the meantime, by the beginning of the sixth century, Cassiodorus had already found,

Arithmetic, Theoretical Geometry, Astronomy, and Music are dis-coursed upon to listless audiences, sometimes to empty benches.17

And as Gibbon summarizes, what followed was indeed ‘the Dark Ages’:

The 7th and 8th centuries were a period of discord and darkness: the library was burnt, the college was abolished … and a savage ignorance and contempt of letters has disgraced … the dynasties.18

The Church has much to answer for, for the closing of the schools and the general mayhem it sponsored. But it would be unfair for us to fail to mention that there were a few isolated individuals who privately collected and saved some of the manuscripts of ancient Greece. Boethius (475–524 ad) was a notable example. But there were also a few Church officials who saved ancient manuscripts and their Church buildings offered the manuscripts some chance of survival during cen-turies of turmoil. And we must not forget the lowly monks, the scribes, who expended a good part of their lives making copies, thereby increasing the odds for survival of individual works of literature. Their tired backs and cramped hands were driven by superiors who told them God would forgive one of their sins for each line they copied. One monk, his superior reported, escaped Hell by the margin of a single letter! It is no wonder that we find a scribe has written at the end of one of his volumes,

This completes the whole;For Christ’s sake give me a drink!

Dr. David Whitwell is a graduate (‘with distinction’) of the University of Michigan and the Catholic University of America, Washington DC (PhD, Musicology, Distinguished Alumni Award, 2000) and has studied conducting with Eugene Ormandy and at the Akademie fur Musik, Vienna. Prior to coming to Northridge, Dr. Whitwell participated in concerts throughout the United States and Asia as Associate First Horn in the USAF Band and Orchestra in Washington DC, and in recitals throughout South America in cooperation with the United States State Department.

At the California State University, Northridge, which is in Los Angeles, Dr. Whitwell developed the CSUN Wind Ensemble into an ensemble of international reputation, with international tours to Europe in 1981 and 1989 and to Japan in 1984. The CSUN Wind Ensemble has made professional studio recordings for BBC (London), the Koln Westdeutscher Rund-funk (Germany), NOS National Radio (The Netherlands), Zurich Radio (Switzerland), the Television Broadcasting Sys-tem (Japan) as well as for the United States State Department for broadcast on its ‘Voice of America’ program. The CSUN Wind Ensemble’s recording with the Mirecourt Trio in 1982 was named the ‘Record of the Year’ by The Village Voice. Composers who have guest conducted Whitwell’s ensembles include Aaron Copland, Ernest Krenek, Alan Hovhaness, Mor-ton Gould, Karel Husa, Frank Erickson and Vaclav Nelhybel.

Dr. Whitwell has been a guest professor in 100 different universities and conservatories throughout the United States and in 23 foreign countries (most recently in China, in an elite school housed in the Forbidden City). Guest conducting experiences have included the Philadelphia Orchestra, Seattle Symphony Orchestra, the Czech Radio Orchestras of Brno and Bratislava, The National Youth Orchestra of Israel, as well as resident wind ensembles in Russia, Israel, Austria, Switzer-land, Germany, England, Wales, The Netherlands, Portugal, Peru, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Canada and the United States.

About the Author

136 Philosophic Foundations of Education

He is a past president of the College Band Directors National Association, a member of the Prasidium of the Inter-national Society for the Promotion of Band Music, and was a member of the founding board of directors of the World Asso-ciation for Symphonic Bands and Ensembles (WASBE). In 1964 he was made an honorary life member of Kappa Kappa Psi, a national professional music fraternity. In September, 2001, he was a delegate to the UNESCO Conference on Global Music in Tokyo. He has been knighted by sovereign organizations in France, Portugal and Scotland and has been awarded the gold medal of Kerkrade, The Netherlands, and the silver medal of Wangen, Germany, the highest honor given wind conductors in the United States, the medal of the Academy of Wind and Percussion Arts (National Band Association) and the highest honor given wind conductors in Austria, the gold medal of the Austrian Band Association. He is a member of the Hall of Fame of the California Music Educators Association.

Dr. Whitwell’s publications include more than 127 articles on wind literature including publications in Music and Letters (London), the London Musical Times, the Mozart-Jahrbuch (Salzburg), and 39 books, among which is his 13-volume His-tory and Literature of the Wind Band and Wind Ensemble and an 8-volume series on Aesthetics in Music. In addition to numerous modern editions of early wind band music his original compo-sitions include 5 symphonies.

David Whitwell was named as one of six men who have determined the course of American bands during the second half of the 20th century, in the definitive history, The Twentieth Century American Wind Band (Meredith Music).

A doctoral dissertation by German Gonzales (2007, Arizona State University) is dedicated to the life and conducting career of David Whitwell through the year 1977. David Whitwell is one of nine men described by Paula A. Crider in The Conduc-tor’s Legacy (Chicago: GIA, 2010) as ‘the legendary conductors’ of the 20th century.

‘I can’t imagine the 2nd half of the 20th century—without David Whitwell and what he has given to all of the rest of us.’ Frederick Fen-nell (1993)