Kindermusik: An Indian Kindermusik Educator Living In The US Tunes In

I believe I was born to be a teacher. I mean, I've been teaching my friends and people around me stuff I knew for as long as I can remember. Anything I knew, I wanted to teach. Then I was transplanted on account of my husband's job to Atlanta, Georgia.

The loss of identity for me was complete - and I was back from teacher to student again, trying to adapt to these new, strange cultures. I lost everybody and everything I was familiar with.

With a dependent's visa, I was in a helpless limbo of professional inactivity, and it took me five years to gather myself and look for alternatives. My Kindermusik odyssey began when I set out to find a one-stop-shop means of helping my three-year-old son to blossom and evolve.

Music has always been a passion for me, so when a friend suggested 'Kindermusik' - a music and movement class for toddlers and pre-school children, I jumped right in. I had no way of knowing then that I was embarking on a developmental journey that would vastly broaden my horizons as a parent and educator.

The Kindermusik Way

This was no class. Kindermusik was an experience. Each age-appropriate program acts as a stepping stone to the next - each stage adds new concepts and challenges along a journey that can last seven magnificent, musical years...

Once a week, my son and I opened our hearts and minds to the Kindermusik way. The repertoire was incredible - songs, stories, finger and toe plays, 'bouncy' songs, small and large motor movement selections, clean up songs... in short, a 'whole body trip'!

Along the way, the instructors added dancing and rhythm instruments such as drums, shakers, sticks and bells especially adapted for little hands, moving with scarves, hoops, puppets and other props. Each session ends with a calming lullaby and entertaining friendship songs.

It was a mind-expanding community experience - even the family weddings and celebrations of my childhood could not match it. Kindermusik, I discovered, provides the ultimate learning atmosphere - fun and instruction perfectly matched for both parent and child!

Each class provided take-home materials like high-quality themed music CDs, creative activities, beautifully illustrated children's books and instruments created to complement the music - and the Kindermusik experience.

Tracing The Roots

The teacher in me prompted me to research Kindermusik's origins and premise. I discovered that this groundbreaking musical movement came into being in 1968, when the West German Government commissioned several doctoral candidates to develop a music and movement curriculum for Kindergarten-aged children.

Over half a million children took part in the program. Today, Kindermusik International - with its headquarters at Greensboro, North Carolina - has over 5000 educators in 35 countries teaching over one million families.

My research also revealed a highly eclectic mix of influences. Kindermusik, I discovered, is founded on some the leading approaches and philosophies in music and movement education that add a whole new dimension to early childhood.

Kindermusik - A 'Sound' Premise

Zoltan Kodaly (Hungary) - Kodaly believed that a child's voice is his/her most precious instrument. He felt it was vital that a child sing often, joyfully, and unaccompanied to develop a tuneful voice.

Carl Orff (Germany) - Orff emphasised the inclusion of singing, movement, instrument playing and improvisation.

Emile Jacques Dalcroze (Switzerland) - Dalcroze advocated the use of movement and building musicianship through hearing, thinking, reading and feeling music emotionally, which in turn enables children to approach their instruments with new understanding and skill.

Shinichi Suzuki (Japan) - Suzuki felt music is learned primarily by listening, in the same manner that we learn our native languages. Developing a musical ear is paramount to all musical development.

Maria Montessori (Italy) - Montessori believed that a child learns best through multi-sensory experiences. If a child can participate in a concept through touch, smell, hearing and sight, the concept will have a much higher impact and recall.

The Kindermusik curriculum is also developed based on more recent research on brain development in the crucial early years. Convinced and mesmerized by what this revolutionary concept is and stands for, I trained to be a Kindermusik educator.

Ever since, the testimonies from my Kindermusik parents have kept me going - without exception, they said they had witnessed amazing forward leaps in their child's developmental evolution.

Many of them reported better relationships with their children, too. I cannot aptly express how it feels to be making such a contribution. It is everything that a teacher could ever ask for, and more...

Research proves that early integration of music into children's daily routine improves their ability to think, reason, create, and express. It touches all domains of learning - cognitive, emotional, social, linguistic ability and physical expressiveness.

More specifically, it promotes language skills, literacy, listening, problem solving, social skills, self-esteem, and musicality. A typical Kindermusik class incorporates all these factors.

The parent in me also had reason to rejoice. My own son, now six years old, has developed an astounding sense of rhythm - and a heart-felt love for singing. He's learning to play the piano and loves to practice. Moreover, he has been part of nurturing environment full of energy, imagination, music, dancing, and playful delight.

At the annual convention in Chicago last October, I learned with joy that Kindermusik is finally coming home to India, thanks to a tie -up with Eurokids International. It makes perfect sense to me - we Indians have an innate ability to absorb the best from all over, and I know for a fact that this program will transform the lives of many Indian children and parents the way it transformed mine and my son's.

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Peirce: The Pragmatist Principle

The most significant indigenous philosophical movement of the United States is pragmatism. Pursuant to discussions of the "Metaphysical Club" at Harvard (which also included William James and Oliver Wendell Holmes as members), Charles Sanders Peirce proposed an important set of methodological principles for scientific investigation.


Noting that the pace of progress in science is often accompanied by confusion about its underlying principles, Peirce suggested in The Fixation of Belief (1877) that this confusion can be eliminated by devoting appropriate attention to the structure of logical inference. This, in turn, Peirce understood to be nothing other than a habit of mind that leads us toward the truth.

According to Peirce, all human inquiry is a struggle against the irritation of uncertainty or doubt. Feeling keenly dissatisfied by any suspension in judgment, we invariably seek to eliminate it by forming a belief, to which we then cling firmly even in the face of evidence to the contrary. So powerful is this urge to believe something in every circumstance that many people (as Bacon had noted centuries before) adopt beliefs upon whatever seems ready-to-hand, including individual interest, appeals to authority, or the dictates of a priori reasoning. But Peirce—rebelling against the excessive rationalism of Hegel, argued that reliance upon such principles is bound to distract us from what matters.

Productive human inquiry, Peirce maintained, must be grounded firmly in reality; only then will our beliefs tend to correspond with the facts. Inquiry of this kind is the process described by scientific method—a systematic set of suggestions that guide us in the acquisition of habits of belief that tend to conform to the ways in which our experiences are most likely to turn out. Although the alternative methods offer many personal advantages, Peirce noted, only science selects for acceptance a belief that is true in the sense that "if acted on it should . . . carry us to the point we aim at and not astray." Preference for such beliefs is the starting-point for Peirce's pragmatism.

Comprehending Reality

In a sequel article entitled How to Make Our Ideas Clear (1878), Peirce applied similar principles to the nature of our conceptions of the world. Decrying the obscurity and confusion surrounding us of the notion of clear and distinct ideas in traditional logic, Peirce proposed a new way of thinking about our mental contents:

    Consider what effects which might conceivably have practical bearings we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.

This principle arises directly from the notion of belief as a habit of thinking that tends to provide a suitable guide to action. But the examples of its application Peirce presented make it even more clear that his pragmatic principles govern the very meaning, as well as the truth, of our beliefs.

In this paper, however, Peirce made it clear that the notion of truth involves not only an appropriate pragmatic connection with reality for the individual believer, but also entails a social relation with other believers. As each one of an indefinitely large number of individual people engages in scientific investigation, their habits of belief will—over the long run—tend to converge upon the same conception of the world, one that most clearly corresponds with reality. As Peirce noted, even human stubbornness, deception, and error can only delay, not completely prevent, our eventual acknowledgement of the natural order.

Philosophical Method

Having failed to gain the academic employment he desired, Peirce in his later years came to resent the greater popular attention that James achieved for pragmatism. In What Pragmatism Is (1905) Peirce correctly claimed credit for having invented the name of the movement—only to disavow it, claiming to prefer "pragmaticism" as a more descriptive title for his own philosophical method.

The method itself remained clear, however, with its firm basis in experimental reasoning, its determination of the meaning of concepts by reference to their consequences for future observation, and its hope for the eventual convergence of human opinion. In fact, Peirce declared even more directly that ontological claim failing to have clear implications for future experience must be dismissed as utterly meaningless. Since his more technical logical writings have only recently come to the attention of scholars who can appreciate them, it was this deliberately anti-metaphysical spirit that constituted Peirce's lasting legacy to American philosophy. 

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Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)

Charles Sanders Peirce studied philosophy and chemistry at Harvard, where his father, Benjamin Peirce, was professor of mathematics and astronomy. Although he showed early signs of great genius, an unstable personal life prevented Peirce from fulfilling his early promise. He wrote widely and delivered several series of significant lectures, but never completed the most ambitious of his philosophical projects. After a respectable scientific career studying the effects of gravitation with the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, Peirce taught logic and philosophy for five years at Johns Hopkins University. In 1887, however, he retired to a life of isolation, poverty, and illness in Milford, Pennsylvania. Peirce     Peirce's early philosophical development relied on a Kantian theory of judgment, but careful study of the logic of relations led him to abandon syllogistic methods in favor of the study of language and belief. His place as the founder of American pragmatism was secured by a pair of highly original essays that apply logical and scientific principles to philosophical method. In The Fixation of Belief (1877) Peirce described how human beings converge upon a true opinion, each of us removing the irritation of doubt by forming beliefs from which successful habits of action may be derived. This theory was extended in How to Make Our Ideas Clear (1878) to the very meaning of concepts, which Peirce identified with the practical effects that would follow from our adoption of them. Peirce     In his extensive logical studies, Peirce developed a theory of signification that anticipated many features of modern semiotics, emphasizing the role of the interpreting subject. To the traditional logic of deduction and induction, Peirce added explicit acknowledgement of abduction as a preliminary stage in productive human inquiry. Continuing to defend a Kantian system of categories, Peirce proposed a descriptive metaphysics that presumed the reality of external referents for our sensations.

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John Dewey - Further Applications of Pragmatism

For the next generation of American philosophers, the pragmatism of Peirce and James became a powerful tool for understanding logical inquiry and improving the quality of human life.

Dewey: Experience and Nature

After studying with Peirce at Johns Hopkins, John Dewey pursued a lengthy academic career, expounding pragmatic principles in professional philosophical journals and promoting their application to social and educational settings. From the outset, he denied that there is any significant metaphysical distinction between mind and body. As "The Unit of Behavior (The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology)" (1896) made clear, Dewey supposed that human awareness and action occur as indistinguishable elements within a coherent experience. In any adequate analysis, what we know is just what we do. Thus, as Dewey noted in "The Practical Character of Reality" (1908), the order of the natural world itself necessarily includes our interaction with it through scientific investigation. What the world is depends upon what we do with it.

The pattern of our thought about the world is explicitly described in Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938). There, Dewey identifies a six-step process that includes:

    * the presence of an indeterminate situation in our experience of the world to which we respond with subjective doubt,
    * our recognition of this situation as a problem to which the principles of inquiry may be applied,
    * our invention of various hypotheses as potential solutions that might (if viable) resolve the problem,
    * our careful reasoning about the meaning of these solutions in relation to the problem itself and to our other convictions,
    * the application of our results to the facts of the situation, understood by reference to the operation of our observations on them, and
    * acceptance of a scientific or common-sense explanation of the situation that provisionally reduces the original indeterminacy.

Notice that at every stage of this process, Dewey emphasized the dynamic and tentative character of our knowledge of the world. The best outcome for which we can legitimately hope is what he called the "warranted assertability" of a belief upon which we can successfully act, without any presumption of its independent, universal, or timeless truth.

Dewey: Morality and Education

Dewey's moral philosophy was thoroughly naturalistic in its vigorous rejection of the traditional dichotomy between fact and value. Human conduct—like every other aspect of experience—is susceptible to the same pattern of thought, as Dewey argued in Logical Conditions of a Scientific Treatment of Morality (1903). Thus, in "The Construction of Good" (1929) Dewey argued that ethical and aesthetic choices are properly addressed as practical, scientific issues.

    Judgments about values are judgments about the conditions and the results of experienced objects; judgments about that which should regulate the formation of our desires, affections, and enjoyments.

This, Dewey believed, completes the great work of empiricism. An experimental approach to moral decision making promises: to secure a proper regard for the future practical consequences of our actions; to reduce the dangerous influence of subjective egoism; and to encourage adoption of a reasonable, modest fallibilism with respect to our moral precepts.

Dewey's application of pragmatic principles to educational and social contexts is expressed in Democracy and Education (1916).

Mead and Addams: Social Dimensions

Dewey's friend and colleague George Herbert Mead placed even greater emphasis on the application of pragmatic philosophy to human society. He argued in Social Consciousness and the Consciousness of Meaning" (1910) that social acts are the irreducible units of all human experience. This social behaviorism became even more explicit in The Social Self (1913), where Mead proposed that an adequate understanding of the self or person invariably requires consideration of its overt relations with other selves.

Also in Chicago, Jane Addams put pragmatism to work in vigorous public activities on behalf of social justice. Twenty Years at Hull House (1912), and Women, War, and Suffrage (1915) describes in detail her efforts to provide basic social services for the disadvantaged. She also participated in the campaign to secure women's suffrage in the United States. [Why Women Should Vote (1915)] A Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Addams was a vocal pacifist, whose Democracy or Militarism (1899) and Newer Ideals of Peace (1907) offer reasoned defences of the potential social and economic value of world peace.

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Locke: The Origin of Ideas

We now leave the Continent for an extended look at philosophy in Great Britain during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Here the favored model for achieving human knowledge was not the abstract mathematical reasoning so admired by the rationalists but the more concrete observations of natural science. Heeding the call of Francis Bacon, British scientists had pursued a vigorous program of observation and experiment with great success. Isaac Newton showed that both celestial and terrestial motion could be explained by reference to a simple set of laws of motion and gravitation; Robert Boyle investigated the behavior of gasses and proposed a general theory of matter as a collection of corpuscles; and Thomas Sydenham began to use observational methods for the diagnosis and treatment of disease.


Philosopher John Locke greatly admired the achievements that these scientists (his friends in the Royal Society) had made in physics, chemistry, and medicine, and he sought to clear the ground for future developments by providing a theory of knowledge compatible with such carefully-conducted study of nature.

The goal of Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), then, is to establish epistemological foundations for the new science by examining the reliability, scope, and limitations of human knowledge in contrast with with the pretensions of uncritical belief, borrowed opinion, and mere superstition. Since the sciences had already demonstrated their practical success, Locke tried to apply their Baconian methods to the pursuit of his own philosophical aims. In order to discover how the human understanding achieves knowledge, we must trace that knowledge to its origins in our experience.

Locke's investigation into human knowledge began by asking how we acquire the basic materials out of which that knowledge is composed, our ideas. For Locke, an idea is Essay I i 8) (Note that this is an extremely broad definition: it includes concrete sensory images, abstract intellectual concepts, and everything in between. The colors and shapes I see before me right now are ideas, and so are my hunger, my memories of the ocean, my hopes for my children, the multiplication tables, and the principles of democratic government.) Ideas, then, are the immediate objects of all thought, the meaning or signification of all words, and the mental representatives of all things. Locke's question was, where do we get all of these ideas which are the content of our knowedge?

Ideas from Experience

First, Locke eliminated one bad answer to the question. Most of Book I of the Essay is devoted to a detailed refutation of the belief that any of our knowledge is innate. Against the claims of the Cambridge Platonists and Herbert of Cherbury, Locke insisted that neither the speculative principles of logic and metaphysics nor the practical principles of morality are inscribed on our minds from birth. Such propositions do not in fact have the universal consent of all human beings, Locke argued, since children and the mentally defective do not assent to them. Moreover, even if everyone did accept these principles, their universality could be better explained in terms of self-evidence or shared experience than by reference to a presumed innate origin. (Essay I ii 3-5) Innatism is the refuge of lazy intellectual dictators who wish thereby to impose their provincial notions upon others. Besides, Locke held, our knowledge cannot be innate because none of the ideas of which it is composed are innate.

As the correct answer to the question, Locke proposed the fundamental principle of empiricism: all of our knowledge and ideas arise from experience. (Essay II i 2) The initially empty room of the mind is furnished with ideas of two sorts: first, by sensation we obtain ideas of things we suppose to exist outside us in the physical world; second, by reflection we come to have ideas of our own mental operations. Thus, for example, "hard," "red," "loud," "cold," "sweet," and "aromatic" are all ideas of sensation, while "perceiving," "remembering," "abstracting," and "thinking" are all ideas of reflection. ("Pleasure," "unity," and "existence," Locke held, are ideas that come to us from both sensation and reflection.) Everything we know, everything we believe, every thought we can entertain is made up of ideas of sensation and reflection and nothing else.

But wait. It isn't true that I can think only about what I myself have experienced; I can certainly think about dinosaurs (or unicorns) even though I have never seen one for myself. So Locke's claim must be about the ultimate origin of our ideas, the source of their content. He distinguished between simple and complex ideas and acknowledged that we often employ our mental capacities in order manufacture complex ideas by conjoining simpler components. My idea of "unicorn," for example, may be compounded from the ideas of "horse" and "single spiral horn," and these ideas in turn are compounded from less complex elements. What Locke held was that every complex idea can be analyzed into component parts and that the final elements of any complete analysis must be simple ideas, each of which is derived directly from experience. Even so, the empiricist program is an ambitious one, and Locke devoted Book II of the Essay to a lengthy effort to show that every idea could, in principle, be derived from experience.

A Special Problem

Locke began his survey of our mental contents with the simple ideas of sensation, including those of colors, sounds, tastes, smells, shapes, size, and solidity. With just a little thought about specific examples of such ideas, we notice a significant difference among them: the color of the wall in front of me seems to vary widely from time to time, depending on the light in the room and the condition of my eyes, while its solidity persists independently of such factors. Following the lead of Galileo and Boyle, Locke explained this difference in corpuscularian fashion, by reference to the different ways in which the qualities of things produce our ideas of them.

The primary qualities of an object are its intrinsic features, those it really has, including the "Bulk, Figure, Texture, and Motion" of its parts. (Essay II viii 9) Since these features are inseparable from the thing even when it is divided into parts too small for us to perceive, the primary qualities are independent of our perception of them. When we do perceive the primary qualities of larger objects, Locke believed, our ideas exactly resemble the qualities as they are in things.

The secondary qualities of an object, on the other hand, are nothing in the thing itself but the power to produce in us the ideas of "Colors, Sounds, Smells, Tastes, etc." (Essay II viii 10) In these cases, our ideas do not resemble their causes, which are in fact nothing other than the primary qualities of the insensible parts of things. The powers, or tertiary qualities, of an object are just its capacities to cause perceptible changes in other things.

Thus, for example, the primary qualities of this rose include all of its quantifiable features, its mass and momentum, its chemical composition and microscopic structure; these are the features of the thing itself. The secondary qualities of the rose, on the other hand, include the ideas it produces in me, its yellow color, its delicate fragrance; these are the merely the effects of the primary qualities of its corpuscles on my eyes and nose. Like the pain I feel when I stick my finger on a thorn, the color and smell are not features of the rose itself.

Some distinction of this sort is important for any representative realist. Many instances of perceptual illusion can be explained by reference to the way secondary qualities depend upon our sensory organs, but the possibility of accurate information about the primary qualities is preserved, at least in principle. The botanical expert may be able to achieve detailed knowledge of the nature of roses, but that knowledge is not necessary for my appreciation of their beauty.

Complex Ideas

Even if the simple ideas of sensation provide us with ample material for thinking, what we make of them is largely up to us. In his survey of ideas of reflection, Locke listed a variety of mental operations that we perform upon our ideas.

Notice that in each of these sections (Essay II ix-xii), Locke defined the relevant mental operations as we experience them in ourselves, but then went on to consider carefully the extent to which other animals seem capable of performing the same activities. This procedure has different results from Descartes's doctrinal rejection of animal thinking: according to Locke, only abstraction (the operation most crucial in forming the ideas of mixed modes, on which morality depends) is utterly beyond the capacity of any animal. (Essay II xi 10)

Perception of ideas through the senses and retention of ideas in memory, Locke held, are passive powers of the mind, beyond our direct voluntary control and heavily dependent on the material conditions of the human body. The active powers of the mind include distinguishing, comparing, compounding, and abstracting. It is by employing these powers, Locke supposed, that we manufacture new, complex ideas from the simple elements provided by experience. The resulting complex ideas are of three sorts: (Essay II xii 4-7)

Modes are complex ideas that combine simpler elements to form a new whole that is assumed to be incapable of existing except as a part or feature of something else. The ideas of "three," "seventy-five," and even "infinity," for example, are all modes derived from the simple idea of "unity." We can understand these ideas and know their mathematical functions, whether or not there actually exist numbers of things to which they would apply in reality. "Mixed modes" similarly combine simple components without any presumption about their conformity to existing patterns, yielding all of our complex ideas of human actions and their value.

Substances are the complex ideas of real particular things that are supposed to exist on their own and to account for the unity and persistence of the features they exhibit. The ideas of "my only son," "the largest planet in the solar system," and "tulips," for example, are compounded from simpler ideas of sensation and reflection. Each is the idea of a thing (or kind of thing) that could really exist on its own. Since we don't understand all of the inner workings of natural objects, Locke supposed, our complex ideas of substances usually rely heavily on their secondary qualities and powers—the effects they are observed to have on ourselves and other things.

Relations are complex ideas of the ways in which other ideas may be connected with each other, in fact or in thought. The ideas of "younger," "stronger," and "cause and effect," for example, all involve some reference to the comparison of two or more other ideas.

Locke obviously could not analyze the content of every particular idea that any individual has ever had. But his defence of the empiricist principle did require him to show in principle that any complex idea can be derived from the simple ideas of sensation and reflection. The clarity, reality, adequacy, and truth of all of our ideas, Locke supposed, depend upon the success with which they fulfill their representative function. Here, we'll consider one of the most significant and difficult examples from each category:

Free Action

Among our modal ideas, Locke believed that those of mixed modes, which combine both sensory and reflective elements, are especially important, since they include the ideas of human actions and provide for their moral evaluation. Among the mixed modes, the ideas of power, volition, and liberty are the most crucial and difficult. To them Locke devoted a chapter (II xxi) that grew, with alterations in later editions, to become the longest in the Essay.

The idea of power is illustrated every time we do something. Whether we think or move, the feeling that our mental preference leads to action provides a simple instance of power. The exercise of that power is volition or will, and the action taken as a result is a voluntary one. Liberty or freedom, on Locke's view, is the power to act on our volition, whatever it may be, without any external compulsion or restraint. (Essay II xxi 7-12)

Under these definitions, the question of whether we have free will does not arise for Locke, since it involves what would later come to be called a category mistake. In particular, it does not matter whether we have control over our own preferences, whether we are free to will whatever we wish. (Essay II xxi 23-25) In fact, Locke offered a strictly hedonistic account of human motivation, according to which our preferences are invariably determined by the desire to seek pleasure and avoid pain. (Essay II vii 3) What does matter for freedom and moral responsibility is that we can act on our preferences, whatever their source, without any outside interference. If I could have done otherwise (given a different preference), then I act freely and am responsible for my action.

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