Reflecting on your own pre-collegiate music education, do you think that Lowell Mason would have been pleased with the outcome of that education? Outline his goals, and compare this with your own experience.

What will be an ideal response?

One of Mason's goals was to create a musically literate culture, which would have included music reading skills. While some American public school music programs accomplish this today, many American high school graduates are not music readers, and America on the whole remains a culture of musical consumers rather than performers and producers. Additionally, the majority of Americans prefer popular music to art music, which is not what Mason envisioned either. Mason probably could not have imagined the invention of recording technology that radically changed the way Americans experienced music.