The Snedden-Farnsworth Exchanges of 1917 and 1918 on the Value of Music and Art in Education

Abstract

In 1917 and 1918, Charles Hubert Farnsworth, a leading music educator from Teachers College, Columbia University, and David Snedden, a critic and educational theorist of national repute, privately exchanged views on the role of art and music in society and in education. Snedden mulled over Herbert Spencer's query “What knowledge is of most worth?” and concluded that music must have practical survival value: it must contribute primarily to the maintenance of social and political order and secondarily to other aims. Farnsworth, on the other hand, thought that music performance or appreciation should be for the immediate joy that it gives the individual, not for some deferred social purpose no matter how important it might be. These divergent positions are explained in light of Farnsworth's interests in philosophy and Snedden's schooling in Spencerian and Darwinian thought.

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