11/15/2025
I do not post here often, but I wanted to share something that really moved me.
For 3 years I have been trying to carve a foothold in a relic model of music education with my main skill set, which is a decolonization approach to music education. Most days that has meant staying quiet, watching, listening, and waiting for the right moment to help shift things. Last night was 3 years in the making.
Students from Marion Graham, in collaboration with students from Bedford Road, put on a benefit concert for public school curricular music. They organized it themselves, without being asked, because they care about democratized music education and wanted to stand up for it.
When students choose their own learning path and actively resist the mainstream, incredible things happen.
Youth are not empowered by being controlled. . The next generation of leaders can only become leaders when they claim their own spaces, practices, and ways of learning.
The last bastion of colonialism is the mind. There is no land left to colonize. This student-led benefit concert is decolonization in action. While they are not gaining any through this performance, these students are planting a seed in fertile ground, pushing back against generations of training in compliance and complacency and reclaiming their spaces in the name of their passions and informed intuition.
And I am proud of them!
🤘
B
