Browsing by Author "Vanonen, Sanni"

This master’s thesis explores what kind of ideals guide music education in Finland in our time. The substantial societal changes of the past few decades have inevitably had an influence on music education. The main goal of the thesis is to define these changes and make visible the patterns of thought behind them. The data for this thesis consists of two documents that create guidelines for music education. These documents are Strategy for Cultural Policy 2025 by the Ministry of Education and Culture, and Vision 2030 for Finnish Music Education, which has been created by professionals in the field of music education. Rhetoric discourse analysis is used to discover how these documents express the neoliberal rationality that dominates thinking and decision-making in the present day, as well as how this rationality affects the goals set for music education. The analysis also examines whether these documents include goals with a different basis. Moreover, the analysis identifies tensions formed in the documents due to inner contradictions or the realities of current society. The results of the analysis show that neoliberal rationality forms three discourses: benefit, market correspondence and cost effectiveness, and individualisation. The new public management also creates responsibility relocation discourse in which nobody is assigned responsible for the changes that have to be made. The desired goals for music education are creating benefits for other areas of life, cost effectiveness, individuality, accessibility, better digitalisation readiness, increasing co-operation and wider knowledge of culture. Tensions are caused by diverging interests, the methods for developing the field and the actualisation of accessibility. In the future, it would be pertinent to find out more about the guiding effects of financial decisions in the music education field as well as how these kinds of guiding documents influence the work of teachers in everyday education.