YouTube is the most extraordinary repository of documentaries on all sorts of subjects. I found myself last night watching a feature-length report from American news anchor Dan Rather investigating the mess that is the Detroit Public Schools system. Schools closed and falling into ruin like modern day Stonehenges, a totally dysfunctional school board, infighting and misappropriation of funds, no text books , teachers who are demoralized and at the bottom of everything students who have given up, are semi if not fully illiterate and who will make up a lost generation, unable to fund work or a future in the crumbling, fire-wrecked mess that is Detroit, a city that used to be the fourth largest in the richest country on earth.

Of course, we have problems here in Australia (and there would be some Aboriginal communities who would look at the Detroit experience and feel they’d seen it all before) but we are living in a paradise compared to downtown Motown. But as this column is called a Soapbox and my natural human inclination is to complain about everything, here we go.

It is depressing that music has dropped off the education radar in Australia. Not in the well-funded private schools, but...