From Panopticon to Possibility: Rethinking Music Education Through Biesta’s World-Centered Lens
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper reflects on how the traditional structures of Western classical music education, long reinforced by hierarchical authority and the “expert gaze,” are increasingly unsettled in contemporary practice. Drawing on Foucault’s panopticon as a metaphor, I show how performance-centered, teacher-dominant approaches have disciplined both students and parents while leaving little room for students’ development of subject-ness. Through a real teaching story, I reveal the emerging cracks in this long-standing system, where digital technology, alternative pedagogies, and shifting cultural values have begun to erode the conservatory’s insulated authority. To interpret this change, I draw on Biesta’s three functions of education—qualification, socialization, and subjectification—and his notion of world-centered education. I suggest that music education must not only prepare students with skills and cultural knowledge but also facilitate subjectification—the capacity for agency, responsibility, and freedom. The discussion highlights implications for practice, including teacher judgment, more balanced power relations, and reflective, technology-mediated pedagogies, suggesting that the future of music education lies in creating spaces where learners encounter the world not as passive recipients but as subjects in the process of becoming with it.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".