"I was a teacher for a long time. I taught at a community college: voice, theory, humanities. And nowadays, music education is a dying thing. Funding is being cut more and more and more"

Jon Secada speaks from the dual vantage point of practitioner and educator, grounding his observation in lived experience: the classroom, the rehearsal room, the shared labor of training voices and minds. His mention of teaching voice, theory, and humanities underscores a holistic view of music studies, not just performance technique, but the intellectual scaffolding and cultural context that allow music to matter. By setting that past against the present, he frames a quiet, steady erosion rather than an abrupt collapse.

Calling music education a “dying thing” functions less as hyperbole than as an alarm about priorities. Funding cuts don’t just trim a budget line; they reshape what a society signals is worth knowing. When resources constrict, arts programs, often seen as discretionary, are the first to go, especially in institutions like community colleges that serve diverse, working-class, and nontraditional students. The loss is not merely aesthetic. Music education builds attention, collaboration, discipline, empathy, and the capacity to listen, skills that transfer across professions and enrich civic life.

His reference to humanities alongside music hints at an ecosystem. Theory trains logic; voice cultivates presence; humanities provide ethical and historical bearings. Diminishing that ecosystem fragments education, tilting it toward narrow utilitarianism and away from the formation of whole persons. The consequence is a thinner public sphere: fewer spaces where people learn to create together, disagree in time and tune, and practice the patient work of refinement.

There is also an implicit critique of metrics. What can be easily measured, test scores, short-term economic outputs, crowds out what unfolds more slowly: cultural continuity, identity formation, community cohesion. Cuts become cyclical; as programs weaken, their visibility and constituency shrink, making them easier to cut again.

Secada’s lament is a call to reframe music education as civic infrastructure. Preserving it is not indulgence but investment in capacities societies rely on, especially in times of fracture: attention, resonance, memory, and shared meaning.