Thinking and Making

Get hold of a copy of the book, where these ideas and many others are expressed much more eloquently. If you only buy one book this year, I would make it this one. * David Ashworth, www.teachingmusic.org.uk, August 2009 *
This is not an easy read, nor is it intended to be: Paynter wants to make us think, and he succeeds. This is writing of the highest quality - thought-provoking, passionate and perceptive . . . Who should read it? Every music teacher who cares about music education and its place in the school. It is clear that we all owe this man and his colleagues a great deal; now he is gone, the least we can do is preserve his work by reading his writings and, much more importantly, continuing to make music in the nation's classrooms. * Patrick Gazard, Music Teacher, September 2010 *
The selection presented enables re-evaluation of the work of John Paynter and in reviewing his thinking it is not long before its relevance to the present time becomes apparent. It offers an alternative to standardised curricula, to the prescription of outcomes, to standardised approaches to assessment, to prescribed strategies, to conventional thought about progression in musical learning, to the homogenising of ways of knowing and understanding and the systematic downgrading of intuitive understanding, to the teacher as unresponsive to what the pupil has to offer, to classrooms that proscribe pupils having ideas and lively classroom conversations, and to the marginalisation of thinking and making. It offers a way of being musical and knowing music. * John Finney, British Journal of Education *