Teaching shifts

Wherever I go, I hear that music in schools is not what it used to be. By this it is not meant that the music which used to be taught is now taught according to different principles, but that the music which used to be taught is now not represented at all. School choirs no longer sing Christian music because the schools themselves aspire to a non-denominational atmosphere. The resources which used to go into maintaining an orchestra are now split among ethnic bands of every sort, because the Western orchestral tradition has been marginalised probably with the stigma that it is elitist. When I sat the other day listening to candidates for an organ award try to play tests which not long ago were commonplace (transposition, score-reading in C clefs, harmonising a melody, fun things like that) I was told these skills are no longer taught (and C clefs no longer a part of common parlance). When asked what music these candidates would choose for an Easter-day service, I was told by one of them (with countless As, many of them starred, in every exam she had ever taken) that she had never been to a church service because her school was rigidly non-denominational, so how would she know?

The inevitable argument that everything in music education is heading dogwards has been laid out elsewhere. What I would like to know is what difference this shift of emphasis in teaching has actually made to professional music-making and the audiences which benefit from it. Some elementary questions can be asked: is it only old people, who were taught before the deluge, who go to orchestral concerts? Are the choral societies, cathedral choirs and conservatoires of this country slowly but surely drying up? Is the number of new discs of classical music (as opposed to reissues of the tried and tested) shrinking?