Pop culture used to be all the stuff you had to wait for after school to enjoy. But these days, pop culture is just as likely to be the stuff you study in school .In 1986 Michael Hannan establish a contemporary Popular Music program at Southern Cross University a trained classical pianist and musicologist he had previously worked in rock bands and for AC/DCs publisher. Hannan recounts how in 2000 at least 8 of the 37 universities in Australia are now offering degrees servicing aspects of the Popular Music, where as in 1985 there were none. In institutions that have traditionally focused on classical music, there may be a realisation that a broader market of students needs to be targeted in order for them to survive in an era of declining public support for the arts . Hannan asks What are the reasons for this mini-revolution in music training in universities? and it is this is the question I hope to debate in this essay.Hannan proposes that, music training has been traditionally limited to middle class students with a classical music background, most of whom qualify for university entry on the basis of the privately-funded individual music, not from the practical music experiences they have received in a public education system . This point is further reinforced by culture theorist Henry Giroux Of course, education has always been a product of privilege,''In that way, pop culture is much more available and accepted than the formal knowledge.'' Hannans significantly focuses on the rapid rise of Popular Music as a serious educational topic while demonstrating a shift in traditional class values that influence what or how things are taught in education systems. This change in attitude does not however alter one specific fact, Most young people contemplating university music study, whether classical or popular, wish to do so because their cultural identity is bound up with music making . In the terms of Popular Culture this affinity with...
