El Sistema and Children’s Participation

• In Event: Engaging Children and Youth in Research and Activism

Abstract

El Sistema is a world-renowned music education project which provides music education to 800,000 children in Venezuela. The government regards this project as a misión (social development programme), an essential architecture of the Bolivarian Revolution. This movement initiated by President Chavez aims to achieve the social inclusion of all citizens in the country by facilitating their participation in various decision-making processes in the Venezuelan society. This, according to the government, is their commitment to human rights.
This paper will assess the viability of this claim, “El Sistema as a facilitator of citizen participation”. Despite the recent emergence of some strong criticism towards El Sistema, this aspect has not yet been analysed in detail. Particularly relevant is the 1989 Child Rights Convention (UNCRC) which provides children’s participation rights in its Article 12. In fact, many of El Sistema’s statements seem to underline the traditional notion of childhood, which has long been an obstacle to the realization of children’s participation rights in the world. The legal analysis of UNCRC Article 12, in conjunction with Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligence Theory in educational psychology, will determine that El Sistema’s current educational model, “learning music for music performance” is insufficient for being a vehicle of citizen participation.
The paper concludes that El Sistema education requires an additional facet of “learning music not for music performance”, by closely working with and within school education, while UNCRC also shows unignorable deficiencies, which must be addressed in the current process of creating the next generation of UNCRC.

Author

• Akihito Okuda