Music Education for Sustainable Development: A Study of Hong Kong and Taiwan

From the beginning of the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005–2014), there has been a growing interest among educators and stakeholders to understand the relationship between cultural diversity (including the value of local and indigenous cultures) and education for sustainable development. Within the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals by the United Nations in September 2015, international development accredited culture for the first time. In this context, this study will examine the relationship between multiculturalism and nationalism for sustainable development in school music education between Hong Kong and Taiwan. The analysis will draw upon the world society theory (also known as the world polity theory), which posits that the education systems of nation-states are largely influenced by the norms of a world society. This study will also examine how Hong Kong and Taiwan deal with the dynamics and dilemmas of school music learning and how they embrace multiculturalism and nationalism in light of domestic demands to maintain a unified political and cultural identity as well as multiculturalism in their respective education systems. By analysing relevant literatures, official documents, and selected music materials used in the respective schools’ curriculums, this study will explore and compare the dynamics and the complexity of relationships between the state, nationalism, and globalization by translating the teaching of both musical and non-musical meanings in schools in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Though there is a different extent of symmetry between sustainability, multiculturalism, and nationalism in the respective school music education delivery, it can be argued that these two Chinese societies show the enduring nature of state ideologies in the dynamic, contentious process of the socio-political construction of music cultures and non-musical values delineated in their individual school curriculums.