KÍNH T. VŨ
Boston University (USA)
November 2025
Published in Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 24 (6): 35–58 [pdf]. https://doi.org/10.22176/act24.6.35
Abstract: As Thomas Regelski’s March 1975 article, “A Ride on the Dialectic Seesaw: Synthesizing the Ideal and the Practical,” was hitting the Music Educators Journal press, the United States-Vietnam War was entering its final days. This essay is an attempt to relate two seemingly distant areas of personal interest: music education and war. As a product and process of both a U.S. education and international conflict, I argue that both areas inculcate children in what could be—or is—a diabolical plan that limits the potential for youth to thrive in music educational settings and the world. By calling on Regelski’s 1975 text as an analog and by extension his 2002 “Methodolatry” article to help anchor this relationship, I underscore the value of children who, for better or worse, bear the weight of a world-in-need.
Keywords: Dialectic, ideal, music education, practical, symbolic children, Vietnam, war
Good Morning, Vietnam!
Imagine real-life, Saigon-based disc jockey Adrian Cronauer, played by Robin Williams, making this announcement on the Armed Forces Radio Service: GOOD MORNING, VIETNAM! It’s April 30, 2025, exactly 50 years after the reunification of North and South Vietnam. Get your flag-waving arms ready, don your yellow-star emblazoned red t-shirts or áo dài,[1] and prepare to flood the streets for the biggest celebration in Vietnam’s recent history. If you’re lucky, you might even catch a glimpse of the military parade featuring more than 13,000 troops marching toward the site where North Vietnamese Tank No. 390 broke through the gates of the South Vietnamese presidential palace grounds, signaling the end of a nasty little epoch in Southeast Asian and world history.
Although this opening anachronism is somewhat flippant, it provides an opportunity for me to introduce readers to the war-time world into which I was born and ultimately evacuated. The film Good Morning, Vietnam! (Touchstone Pictures) was released on 23 December 1987, just seven weeks after I became a naturalized U.S. citizen. I was in 7th grade. My recollection of swearing allegiance to the United States has since metamorphosed from giddy stars-and-stripes flag waving into a complex enigma of having lost my country, my language, my biological family, and my name. Simultaneously and perplexingly written on the same body is a somewhat different story crowded with opportunities in the United States including a career in music and teacher education.
The problem is that it is hard to commit to being one or the other: American or Vietnamese. I keep swerving between two nations’ imperfect roles in what is my not-so-quiet, quiet migration (Weil 1984). Faced with a chore of re-membering (hooks 1994) and disremembering (Nguyen 2023) facts or fabricating new ones, I waffle unsteadily among a mass of imperfect memories about my origins in Vietnam and delivery/deliverance from Southeast Asia to the U.S., literally in a box.
Whether it is convenient amnesia, concealing facts (Pepper 1967, 7), official forgetting (Hayton 2010, 184), or disremembering (Nguyen 2023, 283), memories are instantaneously flawed, incredible, and true. Hayton (2010) opined in Vietnam: Rising Dragon, “The war remains the great unspoken, the great unhealed. It lingers still” (224). Take, for example, President Barack Obama’s speech during a May 2016 visit to Vietnam: “so I come here mindful of the past, mindful of our difficult history, but focused on the future—the prosperity, security, and human dignity that we can advance together” (para. 4).
That “difficult history” (i.e., war) is one worth recalling in this essay, which will eventually meander into music educational instruction as an ideal and/or practical endeavor (Regelski 1975). Viet Thanh Nguyen (2023), in A Man of Two Faces, recounted his own difficult history as a Vietnamese refugee by peeling off war-bloodied bandages when explicating issues of “re membering” (space original) the war (283) in the context of Vietnamese people’s recollections of a nation divided in 1954 and undivided in 1975. A collective Vietnamese/Vietnamese American memory of “Vietnam”[2] might be cadaverously gray and cold if one simply categorizes the end of the war as either the Fall of Saigon or a triumphant reunification. What, however, is the exact shade of red that colors “Vietnam,” when all I know is grounded in stories told, written, filmed, and sung by others?
I have come to a bit of a metaphorical crossroads, or more accurately a snarly roundabout much like the ones found across present-day Ho Chi Minh City, where busses, cars, and literally millions of motorbikes dance the most intricate choreography. What burdens my spirit are the manners in which I have come to and continue to re member my 50-years-ago past. Wartime intrigue such as an adoption process that resulted in my rescue/kidnap from a rapidly deteriorating South Vietnam hued by Ford-Kissinger-era politicking, white saviorism, religious fervor, and of course multinational bloodshed, looms too large. The roundabout saps my energies and leaves little room to contemplate Kính-the-teacher, Kính-the-musician, Kính-the-friend, or Kính-the-survivor.
Perhaps this is where music education cautiously drives into my roundabout. The MayDay Group call to recognize Tom Regelski’s long-time dedication to music education opened a pathway for me to navigate some of the snarl as not only Kinh-the-survivor, but also as Kính-the-teacher and Kính-the-musician. Regelski’s March 1975 article, “A Ride on the Dialectical Seesaw: Synthesizing the Ideal and the Practical,” was published in Music Educators Journal (MEJ) just one month prior to the end of a shared U.S. and Vietnamese epoch that arguably acted as the most critical juncture in my infant life. There were at least three viable options for my body, which was left on a street in Sài Gòn (Vũ and de Quadros 2020): life in Việt Nam, life in the U.S., or death.
Tom’s article inspired me to stay in the roundabout and observe the many streams of traffic that I consider vital to my existence, if not my survival. By encouraging music educators to think about pedagogy dialectically rather than in one of two camps—ideal or practical—Regelski inadvertently cleared a path for me to explore music education alongside a major and personally affecting world event such as the U.S.-Vietnam War. Although Tom was not expressly concerned with acts of re membering, his passion for (creating) discourse, for putting this and that into a constantly moving dialectic, reminds me that our brilliantly inspirational colleague Tom-the-scholar and Tom-the-friend still and thankfully “flits unseen around those they loved” (Ballou 1861, para. 9).
Aims, Process, and Question
This essay is a retrospective on two moments that occurred within a month of each other 50 years ago, in March and April 1975. I will attempt to relate Tom Regelski’s March 1975 dialectical seesaw article to the end of the U.S.-Vietnam War in April 1975. Both music (teacher) education and wargaming loom large on my understanding and performance of self-in-the-classroom and self-in-the-world. I treated (a) Tom’s work and (b) the war like “cases,” both of which have great effect on the children who are at once projects and products of arts instruction and political conflict. I contend that music education and war are not diametrically opposed or segregated from each other. Rather, they can be placed into a sort of discourse, illustrating the power of a dialectic that refuses to camp out among certainties pertaining to either music pedagogy or military conflict.
In some ways, this essay is a convenient application, or quite possibly an appropriation of Regelski’s 1975 article, in which our late colleague explored the interstices between “ideal” and “practical” in music teachers’ considerations of pedagogical aims. By seating ideals and practices on a dialectical seesaw, Regelski set the two polarities into motion rather than leaving them in stasis like museum objects. The metaphorical up-and-down inspired me to apply Tom’s notions about what is ideal, what is practical, and what flows like water between the two to re member the United States of America’s 20-plus-years of intervention in Vietnam.[3] While U.S. involvement in the Cold War may have been ideal in terms of its stand against communism, the practicalities of protecting its citizens from a missile crisis close to home or attempting to save an entire republic far away in the Southeast Asian Peninsula yielded varied results. Some outcomes were favorable (Cuba never deployed missiles thanks to President Kennedy), some were horrifyingly grotesque (Napalm was heavily deployed in Vietnam thanks to President Kennedy), and no results were value neutral.
How children enter this story may appear somewhat morose. Notions that children, later described as symbolic children (Dubinsky 2010), are value-neutral can never be upheld. The lives of children have been appropriated to rally the world’s citizens around peace, goodwill, and charity. Readers of a certain generation might recall teary eyed actress Sally Struthers who represented the Christian Children’s Fund campaign (now ChildFund), which deployed images of children’s faces, oftentimes dirty and sad, and epitomized what Ruth Behar (1996) might have called an “anthropology that breaks your heart.” Regardless of how adults—teachers included—view children, children of all ages occupy the entire length of the seesaw: both ends and everywhere in between.
What is ideal or practical in music education and war for the adults who (un)wittingly participate in them is not necessarily ideal or practical for children who too frequently get caught in the crossfire of adults’ education-gaming and wargaming alike. By placing each “case” into conversation with itself, as Tom did with music teaching in his 1975 article, and with each other as I attempted here, I envisioned a way to connect how I view musical children and war/conflict/violence-touched children and most urgently, musical experiences that breathe in peace and breathe out love. How, then, might Tom’s (1975) dynamic process of exploring dialectical tensions (30) in music education inspire music (teacher) educators to contemplate symbolic children who are projects and products of music instruction and other events such as war?
Meeting Tom: Crisis of Unthinkingness Averted
My pre-service licensure program and early career were marked by a reverence for rules, getting music instruction right, and rationalizing ambiguity (Foote et al. 1992).[4] It was my impression that being a good music teacher meant doing things (how) rather than thinking things (why). Although I thought about doing things like practicing marching drills and organizing fundraisers, my unthinkingness concerning teaching and learning, and more vitally children’s welfare, entrenched me in a muck of pseudo-policy-making, procedures, and punishments (Ayers, Hunt, and Quinn 1998). Had I been more thoughtful, perhaps my (in)sights would have been elevated to a realm where education was a “practice of freedom” (hooks 1994) rather than reinforcement of another school-music industrial complex.
As a quinquagenarian and university faculty member, gazing over my shoulder is painful, because I can see and grieve a sort of early-career educational malfeasance that I caused, partly due to moments of carelessness. How could it be that I paid so little attention to students and their needs and yet was so devoted to (chained to) steady beat and solfege? My adherence to tried and true Big-Note-Band-Series-in-B-Flat or any number of general music methods crossed into religious ecstasy and fanaticism. Unthinkingness is malpraxis (Regelski 2016, 31)[5] and young teacher Kính was responsible for digging the ditch that I erroneously called “the trenches” of public-school music.
Unthinkingness and other kinds of carelessness can be treated, sent into remission, and possibly even cured. With help from a multitude of educational luminaries, both personal colleagues and ones I only know through scholarship and musical works, I was set on a pathway of enlightenment. Among those luminaries was Thomas Regelski, whose shocking ideas came to my attention in the form of doctoral coursework. “On ‘Methodolatry’ and Music Teaching as Critical and Reflective Praxis” (Regelski 2002) was like a two-for-one promotion: full-body ice bath and hot spring experience. Tom’s ideas tingled every fiber of my music educational being. Although I do not intend to explore Tom’s frequently cited methodolatry article in great depth, I see seeds of it in his 1975 MEJ piece, which reads like a beta test for his seminal, and field-shifting, theory.
Communicative Rationality
There is something special about decision-making among the Vietnamese people I know in Ho Chi Minh City. Whether ordering milk tea or purchasing a new motorbike, choosing between this thing (cái này) and that thing (cái đó) is usually a nuanced communication.[6] Although my observations are not generalizable across all Vietnamese peoples, I am struck by the collective, slow-paced, and caring nature of even a seemingly simple choice between one milk tea or another. The keyword is between (giữa). It is not merely the choice of one or the other, cái này or cái đó, but one that is suspended somewhere in the middle, waiting for agreement among the buyers and sellers. Productions and consequences of music education specifically, as well as that of politics broadly (including war), must happen in the spaces between (giữa); not at the end points, but rather where everything everywhere happens all at once.[7]
This feels like an appropriate place to mention communicative rationality (see Regelski 2002) within the context of this article, a way to temporarily hang two seemingly unrelated ideas in suspension: music education and war.[8] I argue later that one commonality between music instruction and politicking is children. More to the point, it is symbolic children (Dubinsky 2010), who are implicitly and explicitly caught in the giữa as projects and products of both music pedagogy and warmongering. Where Karen Dubinsky’s thesis on symbolic children concerned transnationally adopted children, many of whom were (by)products of civil and international conflicts in Central, North, and South Americas, engaging the term “symbolic children” in schematics of music education is possible.
The dialectic seesaw for which Regelski argued in 1975 encouraged teachers to suspend their certainties about pedagogy. But arresting certainty, a trait idiomatic to communicative rationality,[9] can hold children in a precarious balance, oftentimes leaving them out to dry with little regard for their total welfare including participation in a pleasurable music or music educational experience. I think that Tom’s engagement with communicative rationality throughout his life’s work generally and the 1975 article in focus here did not assume that either end of the seesaw was superior to the other. And I am not suggesting that he would hang kids out on a line waiting for “right results” (Regelski 2002, 103) to simply happen on their own. Rather, the balancing act became a sort of negotiation where teachers’ deeply thoughtful decision-making about education, and its participants might ultimately advocate for the best interest of children (see future research below) no matter how suspenseful the plotline.
Tom’s 1975 article is fitting as an analogue for discourse within governmental bodies such as school boards, city councils, general assemblies, congresses, and parliaments, each of which has a necessary and complicated responsibility where children are concerned that far exceeds choosing between milk teas. Nuanced decision-making processes, open-ended and suspended, between what might be considered ideal and/or what might be considered practical for children’s welfare—best interest(s)—in music education or government is always necessary.
Exploring Two “Cases:” Music Education and the U.S.-Vietnam War
In this section, I treat Regelski’s (1975) article and the U.S.-Vietnam War somewhat like “cases.” focusing on dialectical tension. Dialectical tension, as Tom noted in 1975, “is that state in which a teacher is pulled to and fro (sic) from one pole to the other” (30). In both music education and war, the opportunity for teachers and world leaders to dwell between the poles may yield benefits for the children who are nearly always the focus of pedagogy and sometimes warfare.
Spanning Idealism and Practicality in Music Education: Regelski’s Call for a Dialectic
Tom’s examination of music educational purposes in 1975 highlighted the importance of establishing ideals synchronized to practical needs of school music programs and the communities in which those programs exist. To illuminate the dialectical seesaw article, it is useful to invoke the 2002 “methodolatry” text to help explain the balancing act between ideals and practices. Whether ideals are set too low, too lofty, or just right, the central notion stands that without ideals, music teaching might sink into a world of what Regelski (2002) described as techne, that “which advances no ethical disposition for reflecting on the rightness of actual results for students in holistic terms—that is, in terms of their tangible, lasting pragmatic benefits for life” (105).
Techne relies on craftmanship, on the perfection of techniques, and thus it cannot rise to the realms of praxis. Teachers whose aims dip toward techne give more weight to how rather than why. An emphasis on techne “treats teaching as simply techne or craft and students as interchangeable objects to be controlled in a factory-like production line where each is subjected to the same instruction and to standardized ends” (Regelski 2002, 117–18). In a sense, the factory model of school and school music could itself be a method(olatry), whereby instructional formulae are the marching orders that teachers and administrators employ to streamline children, and ostensibly their music-making, into predictable and undeviating noisemaking.
Praxis, techne’s stabilizer, summons philosophical thinking that tempers the “bleeps and blops” style (to invoke Robert Woods’s April 1975 MEJ article) how-to positionality with deeper thinking about pedagogical matters. “Thus, practical knowledge for helping people is called praxis (italics original) and involves the ethical criterion of phronesis” (Regelski 2002, 104), which Regelski called “right result,” “the need to observe standards of care” (Regelski 2002,104). As I described above, my preservice- and novice music teacher-self expressed little interest in praxis, erring on the side of the seesaw where stuff got done, fast![10]
Even if I had been keen to explore ideals in pedagogy as a young teacher, dressing my practices in nouveau fashions like critical pedagogy, student-centered learning, or all-abilities education might have been quickly tempered and/or summarily quashed by practical realities that piled up like fallen leaves at the school door. Take, for example, Vietnamese journalism education around the 2010s when novice writers were sent abroad to learn new reporting strategies. Hayton (2010) reported that after attending foreign courses, “journalists returned to their old newsrooms, where nothing had changed, and were bludgeoned into submission by the weight of seniority above them” (157). Perhaps it is not a stretch to imagine how even the most robust music teacher education cannot account for or prepare preservice teachers for the daily realities of deadlines, concerts, rules, and conformity cultures that teachers face around the world.
These two positions, techne and praxis, communicate fixed positions that if teachers were to hang out at one side of the playscape and never visit the other side, so much of education’s potential benefits (e.g., safety and spontaneous joy) for children would be lost. And if the dialectical seesaw was the beta test for methodolatry, then the trip across the playscape would be the most interesting part of the journey, where all sorts of things could be learned about how children use the playscape, play games with each other, and know their worlds from seesaws and sliding boards to swing sets and sandpits.
Pressing a music educational dialectic exercise into service, as Regelski suggested in 1975 and later in 2002 via the exploration of tension between ideals and practices and Habermasian discourse respectively, potentially offers teachers an escape route from the malaise (trap) of formulaic button pushing which, incidentally, does not necessarily beget a “right result” (Regelski 2002). The right result, in my opinion, advocates balanced, total care for human life and human experiences, both techne and praxial. Where efficiency may be useful and necessary for certain things such as aspects of ensemble instruction, it runs into a sort of statute of limitations where students who do not fit a singular mold are quietly left to struggle underneath their more accomplished peers. Alternatively, those “accomplished peers” may not be challenged to excel beyond the established curriculum and can be duped into celebrating their first-chair positions by teachers who laud them like heroes. This is neither an ideal situation nor one that promotes dignity for any musician.
Music education, regardless of a/the right result, can be “a tapestry of rich and royal hues” (King 1971) in its aims and includes various artistic, extramusical, social, and political endeavors. To unravel the fabric, pulling out individual strands, would risk diminishing music learning and teaching to only one or two, usually teacher-directed endeavors. A reductionist view that turns away from field-specific discourse of any sort, music education included, is tantamount to malpraxis. In the next section, I scantily overview the U.S.-Vietnam War, because it is the warp and woof that binds my life’s tapestry as music educator, political body, and human being. I can never ignore or look away from Vietnam or the proxy war which resulted in my displacement from Southeast Asia. War and music education are co-dependent.
What Burdens My Spirit: The U.S.-Vietnam War
President Lyndon B. Johnson posed this question about U.S. involvement in Vietnam on September 29, 1967: “Why should three Presidents (capitalization original) and the elected representatives of our people have chosen to defend this Asian nation more than 10,000 miles from American shores?” (para. 10). Among Johnson’s answers, loosely itemized in parallelisms reminiscent of Thomas Jefferson’s allegations tallied against King George III (e.g., He has refused/forbidden/dissolved), is that “we have sought to strengthen free people against domination by aggressive foreign powers” (Johnson 1967, para. 11). Recall that Vietnam was divided at the 17th parallel into North Vietnam and South Vietnam during the Geneva Conference in July 1954. “Aggressive foreign powers” in this case were North Vietnam specifically and global communism more generally.
The U.S.-Vietnam War burdens my spirit in this, the 50th Anniversary of the war’s end. The warring world into which I was born is the common thread that binds my performance of self to every aspect of my life, including my career as a music (teacher) educator. What is inconceivable to me is that while many U.S. citizens were paying rapt attention to Walter Cronkite’s nightly news reports concerning South Vietnam’s unraveling and what is now referred to as the Fall of Saigon by many Vietnamese Americans, MEJ and possibly other areas of music education teaching and scholarship seemed to be conducting business (or Beethoven) as usual. By “business as usual,” I wonder how music education remained isolationist at a time of immense human crisis. Where music educational spaces such as pK–12 classrooms, schools of music, and academic/trade journals might appear to have been an escapist retreat from a highly charged political crisis, these backdrops could, in fact, have been places where the “big questions” (Allsup and Shieh 2012, 48) could have been raised by teachers and students whose lives are always touched and sometimes smacked by the political happenings that govern their daily lives.
Dialectical tension is spawned when questions, big or not-so-big, are leveled concerning a choice between cái này and cái đó. The war between North and South Vietnam, at least in the story of my life, was the ultimate tension that required deliberate, delicate, and careful discernment. I oftentimes wonder about wartime discourse at a time when complete withdrawal options were finally on the table for the U.S. military and its advisors. Among the stakeholders who stood to benefit or suffer from America’s departure specifically and the war’s end broadly, of course, were children. Take, for example, the 2500–3000 Vietnamese orphans who were transported on military cargo planes and Boeing passenger jets to the United States during Operation Babylift, beginning April 4, 1975.[11] The choice between leaving children behind or taking them abroad was ultimately decided by President Gerald Ford,[12] who authorized the migration. I often muse about Ford’s states of mind and heart as he sat in the middle of the seesaw teetering between various options, ones that would be nearly impossible for me to choose between if I were enthroned in the Oval Office. But given the potentials for life or death, how could or why should the U.S. and other western nations leave the children behind in the ruins of a country co-destroyed by multinational involvements?
Borrowing from Regelski, the ideal and practical processes or solutions might not always or ever be perfect. Yet I struggle to understand why nation-states invest time, energy, money, and troops in creating problems that they must eventually solve, for the solutions are rarely equal to the plights suffered by involved parties (i.e., civilians and soldiers). In this situation, the problem to be solved is children, who all too often represent innocence and hopes for a promising future. (Is this the right result?) It is vital to stretch beyond U.S.A. for Africa-style propaganda that touted a “We Are the World; We Are the Children” (1985) brand of youthful innocence. For example, Karen Dubinsky argued that “the social category ‘child’ is at once real and metaphorical – powerful as a cultural construct, but equally as forceful in flesh and blood” (Dubinsky 2010, 5). Those same children, the ones who willingly and potentially willfully walk into schools and music classes across the United States, become at once symbols of hope for a brighter day and reminders of the assumed darker days that came before.
The antecedent darker days include stories that I did not experience first-hand, yet they wheeze to life, weasel into my life through scores of newspaper articles, scholarly writings, documentaries, plays, and songs that re member the diabolical war schemes which produced agent orange, countless civilian deaths, and thousands of orphaned children, including me. It is or should be a foregone conclusion that children were enlisted as main characters in what might be summarized as a tragic, national failure such as grossly over-confident U.S. interventionism—warmongering—in Vietnam. In each “case,” music education and war, children are at risk of being caught in the middle. In the following segment, I contemplate why adults might participate in a sort of conjoined dialectic that does not ignore children and their best interests.
Discussion: Symbolic Children Caught in Crossfire Rather Than a Dialectic about Music Education and War
It is my hope that by situating Tom’s 1975 article regarding ideals and practices in music education alongside the U.S.-Vietnam War epoch, readers might re member how music education and world events are linked. These “cases” are not diametrically oppositional forces located in loneliness at either end of a line; rather, they can and ought to be conceived along a continuum attached by a dialectical tightrope strung between them. Considered separately, discourses in music education and in war are difficult conversations in which to partake, whether in classrooms or at dinner tables. Taken together, the discourse about strange bedfellows—music education and war—calls for unconventional thinking about both fields.
These two “cases” meet at the time of my birth: an MEJ article that, unbeknownst to Little Orphan No. 18,[13] would one day, 50 years later, help me consider the birth country that I lost in March and April of 1975 in relation to my present-day career in a field of music education. Although the relationship that I am proposing may not be wholly apparent or logical, children tend to be subject to the machinations of adults and are oftentimes in the crosshairs and crossfire of both music educational systems and foreign affairs. What seems at first a conflictual relationship, if a relationship at all, may be joined by employing Tom’s thesis of discourse, a necessary step to advance a cause of democracy in the form of thoughtful and thought-provoking music education.
But music-mongering and warmongering continuously ensnare youngsters and the adults who endeavor to create a musical world through arts teaching. Rather than engaging in discourse that might give rise to a suspension, if not wholesale denial of certainty in pedagogy or politics (are they different?), the dialectic that Tom encouraged in music education is absent or possibly rendered too philosophical or impractical for the everyday demands of a world that requires action regardless of how (un)thoughtful. While I wish to think that I have been part of a solution rather than a problem in my classrooms and committees, I am still guilty of unthinkingness that perpetuates music for the sake of music versus musics of, by, and for all people. I strive to be a teacher who “empowers people to be agents for change toward good rather than evil” (Jorgensen 2020, 10).
“Toward good.” That sounds good. But evil is alive and well. Evil in forms of music-mongering and warmongering still exist and are promulgated and perpetuated by power-driven individuals who treat their places of power, such as rehearsal spaces and meeting rooms, as dominions to be overlorded. Evil in the form of music-mongering may not be life threatening, but autocratic teachers can dash student musicians’ expectations for creativity and identity formation against brick-hard school walls. Warmongering is diabolical and most surely entraps, maims, and kills children in designs not at all of their making. Unfortunately, the latter is not restricted to distant battlefields such as those in Gaza or Ukraine; war-like actions and their effects can appear as close to home as a concert hall. In the spirit of full transparency, I was cast in both roles: first a war baby whose body was left on the street and second as a musically colonized youth who learned whiteness (and rightness) from music teachers, among other school and community leaders.
Music education and war implicate children in various schemes created by grown-ups inclusive of teachers and warlords. Karen Dubinsky argued in Babies Without Borders that “symbolic children have come to represent an unequal world, with little consideration of the circumstances—created by adults—which produced them” (Dubinsky 2010, 21). Adults, some of whom are teachers like me, can inadvertently miscalculate the magnitude of children in their midst, potentially reducing student musicians to a means in service to some end musical or otherwise. They become, as Dubinsky stated about adopted children, “globally controversial, symbolic children, such as the labouring child and the child soldier” (Dubinsky 2010, 14). What difference does it make if an adult hands a child a bassoon or a bazooka? The effect can be chilling if or when unthinkingness and power struggle are allowed on the playground or battleground.
Additionally, when music education or the opportunity for a music education is misinterpreted as whimsy, something wonderful for human development, or a common good (see Yob and Jorgensen 2020), children and teachers are further entrenched in a music-education-is-wonderful fantasy. On the best days, politicians and teachers may unwittingly underestimate the power of children, whether as agents of their own destinies or composers of personal, soulful music. But on the bad days, children are typecast as monolithic symbols of an innocent “global imagination” (Dubinsky 2010, 14), located somewhere along an infinitely complex spectrum inclusive of who children are and what they might mean to societies around the world.
When I conceived of this article inspired by the MayDay Group’s call for papers to commemorate Tom’s life in music education, I uncovered a disconnection between Music Educators Journal articles and world chronologies during the war’s end days. While the U.S. was embroiled in a highly contested intervention in Southeast Asia, one that had similarly devastating effects for Vietnamese and U.S. citizens, a cursory glance at MEJ turned up little evidence signaling recognition of an America at war. Similarly, eight years before Tom’s 1975 article, during an intense ramping up of U.S. ground troop involvement in Vietnam, the Tanglewood Symposium convened in Western Massachusetts in August 1967. This symposium assembled men of industry, commerce, and music/education. Glancing at the myriad essays that emerged from Tanglewood, music education seemed like something of an escapist, even isolationist, retreat in which music education itself was a grand hallucination.
The issue that causes disquiet for me is how music education enacted forgettingness or missingness, words borrowed from Dubinsky’s (2010) work on child adoption and symbolic children. President Johnson’s speech, in which he explained American involvement in Vietnam, cited earlier in this essay, was delivered just over a month after the Tanglewood Symposium. Yet, while Tanglewood participants were cozied up in the Berkshires, Uncle Sam and Uncle Hồ were busy replenishing troops with seemingly unlimited reinforcements and replacements; soon after that, families on both sides of the Pacific suffered immense, unforgivable, and unforgettable losses. I cannot help but think that acts of forgettingness and missingness characterized a field of music learning and teaching that, even today, may discount current events and children in favor of checking bags at the rehearsal room door so that music(?) can be made: That is the hallucination I once embraced.
This quandary is pointedly addressed in my chapter in Cayari, Thompson, and Rajan’s (2025) volume If Colors Could Be Heard. I argue that music educators have a particular power stance from which they might engage or disengage students, their worlds, and the great big globe beyond school and schooling. The baggage contains so much of the stuff that makes us who we are as human beings: our suffering, our sparkle, and absolutely our songs. For example, in repertoire selection or ensemble class conversations about extra-musical topics for which Kate Fitzpatrick (2012) advocated, teachers might seize opportunities to connect school-based music experiences to students’ lives beyond school: at home, in local communities, or around the world. Music instruction that occurs at the will of educators does not—and I argue should not —be divorced, dismembered, or disremembered (Nguyen 2023) from students’ lived worlds inside or beyond music room walls.
The tensions between this and that—ideal and practical—must stir some sort of movement within and around teachers and other leaders if school-based or any other form of music education will remain viable and fun. But the terrifying issue at hand and the painful source of self-aggravation is the unthinkingness that pervaded my novice teacher life, the bad old days of techne over praxis (Regelski 2002). Ontological or epistemological wakefulness beyond notes and rhythms, marching drills, and pizza fundraisers—each a gross subterfuge for meaningful musical engagements—was absent life-sustaining oxygen that might have counteracted school-music induced “endullment” (Regelski 2002, 111) that I suffered and most certainly cause(d). Worst of all was that I treated children and youth as if they were tools and construction materials in a Pink Floydian assembly line dystopia featuring me, their (in)glorious bringer of music.
As I have aged and my networks of colleagues and co-conspirators has expanded and evolved, I have come to know so many brilliant people working in many fields and professions, including government. I want to believe that all kinds of people, thoughtful people like Tom, dwell in the halls of governments around the globe. Dr. Regelski was a luminary and wise beyond his years, even in his young 30s when he penned the dialectal seesaw article. His deeply insightful and inciteful criticisms of and recommendations for music education in 1975 did not explicitly call out the field for its own unthinkingness on matters of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. What Tom did write is eerily telling of a present-day United States that yearns for something good rather than evil, something whole rather than dismembered or disremembered, something fabulously flexible rather than rigidly certain of itself:
Because the strain of pragmatism in American society is so strong, idealists are often thought of as useless dreamers, impractical visionaries, and unrealistic do-gooders. But our nation was populated and developed under the banner of hundreds of ideals. As always, we are still concerned with what we are in comparison with what we could or should be. The ideal of excellence persists in America (Regelski 1975, 33).
Limitations
Communicative rationality served my purposes only loosely. Couching a single music education article published in March 1975 within a deeply contested war-scape and one of its manifestations—the evacuation and adoption of (symbolic) children—feels like precariously balanced scholarship. My concerns about what is ideal and what is practical may have dipped the seesaw more toward world politics than toward music education. Importantly, music education is a body politic of a certain kind, and I cannot quite get to the music education without going on the proverbial bear hunt: We can’t go over it; we can’t go under it; we have to go through it! So long as world leaders and school leaders continue to music- and warmonger, a discourse between my chosen field of music education and an ever-present threat or enactment of wars will always be ripe for examination.
Although this article is my first attempt at exploring an awkward relationship, one in which I am a key stakeholder, I contend that ongoing conversations—and music-making—alongside a suspension of certainties or absolutes may provide spaces for teachers, teacher educators, and their students to musick with re-membered (hooks 1994) and re membered (Nguyen 2023) heads, hands, hearts, and spirits in what can be a bright tomorrow.
As a dual stakeholder whose vested interest weaves through and around music education and U.S.-Vietnam war histories, it is difficult to remain distant (bias-free) or anonymous (unnamed, nameless) for the purposes of an industry-standard article review process. In my situation, the Vietnamese name I reclaimed in 2010 (more ideal than practical for certain) was created at a central Sài Gòn orphanage in early 1975, lost on a cargo plane during Operation Babylift, and completely stripped and then replaced with a white name during the adoption process. While I wrote this essay at numerous cafés across Sài Gòn, now Thánh Phó Hồ Chí Minh (Ho Chi Minh City), I considered how being stripped of one’s name or denied an opportunity to be called by your name (Vũ 2023) risks denuding writers of their liveliness, much like napalm and white phosphorous once did to densely foliaged jungles across my (North and South) Vietnamese homeland. Even in the context of limitations, the ideal and the practical are at odds, mutual exclusivity between being named or separated from a name once, twice, and thrice again.
Future Research
Asking questions, and Tom asked a lot of questions, is at the heart of our collective field. By probing all sorts of questions, some large and others not so large, we open our lives to a world of people who make our field better, us better, and the human species better. Questions that stir my imagination concern issues of children’s rights and their relationship to schools and education, these being unequal, but tightly woven together.
Music educators may be uniquely prepared to interact with children who experience displacements of various kinds (Vũ and de Quadros 2020) as well as subsequent placements like adoption or foster care. Clara Haneul Yoon (2022) may be one of the only music education scholars to mention child adoption as an example. There are two important international conventions that work into my emerging scholarship. Each convention provides guidance to nation-states regarding children’s rights broadly and adoption specifically: The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) and the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption (1993). Related to this essay and future study is a central tenet of both conventions, which is that governments at all levels must advocate for the best interest(s) of the child. How do/can local governments and school leaders, including music educators, work to the benefit of children who are projects and products of war?
Music or music education cannot do more than the people who engage in these fields are willing to do. If a music teacher has only singular aims, such as concertizing with the wind ensemble or orchestra, then that is a (right) result: concerts. Alternatively, if extramusical projects are the primary goal (e.g., ameliorating world hunger via music department fundraisers), then perhaps that is the product, musically satisfying or otherwise. So, what can music education sound like and look like for its participants in the interstices between music for music’s sake and extramusical aims?
Conclusion: Chasing Birds and Ideals Not So Different
Remembering a luminary such as Tom Regelski has helped me fathom various aspects of war and my displacement with that of my music educational life heretofore only vaguely examined (see Vũ and de Quadros 2020). In Tom’s (1975) estimation, what may be considered ideal might not always be practical and vice versa. It is in the dialectical and conundrum-laden span between ideals and practicalities where active hope for deeply thoughtful, child-focused teaching and learning might emerge. Straddling what feels like a gaping maw between proxy war politics and music education has its challenges. Where I have wrestled with drawing a convincing relationship between the two poles, in the crossing I encountered a sort of structural violence (Galtung 1969) that I believe was partially responsible for altering and/or erasing my Vietnamese identity (e.g., stripping me of name, socializing me in whiteness).
As I wrote this conclusion, I was sitting near a central Sài Gòn park watching children gleefully run after pigeons. Chasing ideals is like chasing birds; the pursuit can be ongoing. Regelski’s reminder is helpful: “The practical will continue to chase the ideal with renewed vigor, aware that the ideal will never entirely be caught, but must always be sought” (Regelski 1975, 33). Whether in music education or world affairs, the responsibility of leaders is to reach into and across the maw, draw connections and consensus where possible, and (re)visit policies ostensibly established to help people, most especially children, upon whom the weight of a world-in-need rests.
About the Author
Kính T. Vũ is an assistant professor of music at Boston University where he teaches music education and fine arts courses such as general music methods, instrumental music lab, and intra-disciplinary arts seminars. During a recent sabbatical, Kính began to theorize how salvation narratives are embedded into transnational/transracial adoption and music education, particularly for Asian American adoptees who are music teachers. Kính is the subject of a one-hour documentary by 4thDistrict Co. called Song of Earthroot (2023) in which he speaks and sings about the conundrum of simultaneously identifying as Asian, American, Asian American, and none of these whatsoever. Along with André de Quadros (Boston University), Kính was lead editor of the first-ever text on forced human displacement within music education fields called My Body Was Left on the Street: Music Education and Displacement (Brill–Sense 2020).
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[1] Áo dài are traditional costumes worn on special occasions as well as for certain occupations by all people in Vietnam.
[2] “Vietnam” in quotation marks nods to the very difficult history of a national identity crisis. Although Vietnam has been unified since April 30, 1975, it tends to exhibit traits of a nation divided, even if in jest.
[3] The Vietnam War was not limited to the geopolitical borders of Vietnam alone. It crossed into neighboring Laos and Cambodia where the infamous Ho Chi Minh Trail slipped alongside Vietnam and served as a North Vietnamese Army supply and troop route between North and South Vietnam.
[4] I recall an internship I held at the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra’s Education Outreach Office. An Arts PROPEL brochure was among the offerings on the lobby’s coffee table. I remember reading a statement that seemed to make good sense; it read something like “artists have the ability to rationalize ambiguity.” That felt right and good to me. Why not close the open ends and smooth the roughness of musical performances? Today, I feel completely opposed to that statement. Please do not rationalize ambiguity.
[5] Regelski coined the term malpraxis to describe educational malpractice, likening it to unethical practices in helping fields.
[6] To convey the importance of nuanced communication, I have included Vietnamese words using tone and diacritic markers in this section.
[7] Aside from alluding to the Academy Award-winning film Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), I intended to convey the way transactions oftentimes occur on the street in Ho Chi Minh City. People oftentimes talk over and under each other with seemingly no missed communication.
[8] Regelski (2002) carefully employed Jürgen Habermas’s version of critical theory to describe how theoretical abstractions must be placed in dialog with practical concerns. Related to teaching, Regelski underscored that a comprehensive accounting of “historical, social, subjective, contextual, personal, interpretative, collective, and situational factors, and no less so in educational and musical matters” might counter technicist approaches with a “‘lifeworlds’ of teachers” (109) approach.
[9] Regelski’s scholarship oftentimes relied on Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality. In Tom’s 1975 “Dialectics” article, Regelski did not name Habermas or the theory explicitly when he situated ideals and practicalities of music teaching and learning into conversation. A basic definition of communicative rationality underscores the importance of “language which necessarily involves the raising of ‘validity-claims’…the status of which, when contested, can ultimately only be resolved through discussion” (Dews 2018, para. 1). Validity-claims such as truth or rightness must be encountered in discourse that momentarily suspends judgment, something that seems like a luxury in world political-scapes of 2025.
[10] This is not a criticism of my college education or early career mentorship; rather, it is an observation that is available to me only as a mid-career music (teacher) educator.
[11] President Gerald Ford authorized $2 million for this mass migration of orphans on August 3, 1975, while on travel to San Diego, California. Operation Babylift’s first flight out of Sài Gòn crashed in a rice field minutes after takeoff. Ensuing babylift flights resumed on April 5. My flight on April 11 was not part of an official Operation Babylift and was the first to evacuate so many children without promised homes in the U.S. or elsewhere.
[12] President Ford was adopted by his mother’s second husband. Ford’s birth name was Leslie Lynch King, Jr. After college, he officially changed his name to Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr.
[13] To remove orphans from war-torn Sài Gòn, orphanage officials created manifests listing children’s names, birthdates, sexes, and adoption statuses. Most of these data about abandoned or relinquished children were unknown. My name was placed 18th on the list that was presented for approval to South Vietnam’s Deputy Prime Minister for Social Welfare and Refugees, Dr. Phan Quang Đán.