All of the individuals featured in "A Quiet Revolution" are alumni of the Insights Into Learning class, an introduction to new approaches to music pedagogy taught by the article's author, Edward Bilous. A member of the Juilliard faculty since 1986, Bilous—a nationally recognized leader in the field of arts education, who has conducted related master classes and seminars around the country—has spent the last two decades setting new standards for arts education.

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In 1979 Bilous was a master's degree student at Juilliard, studying composition with Elliott Carter. He was lucky to have been awarded a much coveted position as a teaching fellow for Vincent Persichetti in L&M IV, which, he says, "inspired me to pursue a path in arts education." Persichetti encouraged Bilous to apply for a teaching position with the newly created Lincoln Center Institute, headed by Mark Schubart, the former dean of Juilliard. Later that year, Bilous was invited to join the faculty of the L.C.I. as one of their first teaching artists.

Over the next decade, his work in arts education expanded to include workshops, seminars, and teacher-training sessions across the U.S., at places like the Tanglewood Institute, Columbia University, the Leonard Bernstein Center for Arts and Education, Chamber Music America, the Nashville Institute for the Arts, and the Texas Institute for the Arts.

Through teaching, Bilous says he learned a great deal about our society's views of arts education. "After meeting with educators across the United States I came to understand that the arts had something special to offer students of all ages beyond the usual stuff you read about like 'it's a good way to teach history' or 'playing in an orchestra teaches cooperation—just like playing basketball.' The arts do much more than that. They require that we reconsider what we assume to be true, to view the world anew and be open to possibilities."

Bilous believes that the arts show us new and unexpected relationships between our private world and the greater world around us. "There is a Kabalistic image of a thin veil that separates what we know from the unknowable," he says. "I like to think of the arts as the veil through which ideas and images that have not yet taken form enter our consciousness."

While Bilous was on the faculty at L.C.I., he says he "came to realize that students are not empty vessels into which teachers pour information. Students come to every experience with a full body of ideas, expectations, skills, and talents. It is the responsibility of teachers to help them to discover the hidden truths that lie in a work of art and by doing so learn to trust their own innate intelligences and abilities. I believe this is the main difference between training and education. Training conditions one to perform an act or function. Education allows you to see beyond what is and imagine what might be."

When Bilous assumed the position of chairman of the L&M Department, he was ripe with experience from the field. He decided his first project at Juilliard would be to create a class that would expose students to "the kinds of teachers I had the good fortune of working with at L.C.I." The result was Insights Into Learning, which, Bilous says, "has been one the greatest joys of my work at Juilliard."