The new “avant-garde pedagogy” resolutely rejects the traditional humanistic ideal of a “harmoniously developed personality”, abandons education based on the historical continuity of cultural tradition and devotes its efforts to the absurd self-expression of the “alienated personality”, conjuring the forces of alienation in a mystified struggle against them. At the same time, the area of the “creative” and the area of the “pedagogical” merge, there is no longer any difference between them.
It would be unjustified boldness to raise the question of the concept of personality in connection with only one musical education. Musical education is a part of general education.
The “concept of personality” in the strict sense is a subject of general pedagogy, philosophy, psychology, and sociology. In musical education, we can only talk about individual symptoms of certain personality types. Musical education is not omnipotent, not universal, and without ethical education, for example, it cannot promise us the formation of even such a person, who is commonly called a “man of good will”. As for the individual symptoms that define a particular type of personality, here musical education is an exceptional field of observation (thus, when describing and comparing the system of musical education of G. Orff with the “experimental pedagogy” of the avant-garde, we will note in the first case the symptoms of a “harmoniously developed personality”, in the second – an “alienated personality”).
