Teaching the devil’s music: Some Intersections of Popular Music, Education and Morality in a Faith School Setting

This chapter describes a summary of faith-based education in the United Kingdom, and reviews some of the literature and other responses to the intersection of religion and education. It considers the relationships between music education, religion and morality, and how these relationships have been understood historically. The chapter also considers societal responses to popular music in terms of morality, and the implications that this has for co-opting popular music as an object and mode of study in education. It examines popular music education in a faith school setting through some semi-fictional vignettes. The chapter focuses on dilemmas that popular music educators might encounter, and which require the negotiation of a complex and ambiguous moral and musical terrain, and an awareness of potentially conflicting responsibilities to a number of stakeholders. The value of music education has been rationalized in moral terms since antiquity.