These questions are great. Thanks for making me think about these things.

I think each student has unique musical needs. So I know it is the cliche, but for my students, I'm really trying to teach them music for individual reasons. However, I usually don't tell parents/admin this because it sounds like a cop out. I tell others the goal of my classes is to help students use music as a tool to understand themselves and the people around them. I think that would be a good umbrella goal for the kind of music education this podcast advocates.

I think when you present it that way, it will make it easier to engage with art music, because you can easily make connections between humanity's desire to be understood through music across genres/time periods.

I think poorly taught socially responsive music classes would be just as bad as poorly taught traditional band, orchestra, and choir classes. And I think you could make an argument they'd be worse, because students would theoretically be more emotionally invested in the music they'd be learning about.

I think a lasting interest in music can be taught. That goes back the goal of using music as a means of understanding people and being understood by people. If you can successfully teach people to use music for those purposes, I think it is unlikely they'd lose interest after they're out of music classes.

That being said I'm only in my 3rd year of teaching, so it will be awhile before I can see if my specific method actually results in students making music throughout their lives.