Any music teacher who has planned a holiday concert knows about the politics underlying the selection of appropriate music. Some students do not sing carols or cite lyrics that refer to fictional characters such as elves, goblins, or Harry Potter. Still others do not sing the national anthem. To these students or their parents, such songs represent cultural traditions or heritages that have values incompatible with their own. These are some of the political realities of school music, and most music educators navigate these waters with varying degrees of comfort, planning their public performances and school activities to be inclusive and to reflect what they hope will be a value-neutral approach to music study. Still, questions remain about whose music to study and perform and why. Recently, some music scholars have suggested that we need to reconsider the basis for music selection. Their concern is not that a particular musical work has been chosen for performance. Rather, they believe that the aesthetic justification we give to music education and the highly personal and reflective musical meaning we claim to engender through music study favor the European art-music tradition at the expense of all other musical traditions. David Elliott, in particular, argues that the aesthetic rationale for music study denigrates the social and cultural heritages of music. According to Elliott, rather than studying music of the students' own time and cultural place, music educators using an aesthetic rationale seek to develop an internalized value system within each student that ignores these social and cultural elements.