Is Music Education the Solution to Improving the American School System?
Is this just some liberal progressive fantasy where school children are encouraged to explore the arts rather than math and science, or is there some credible thought and science behind this proposal?
Joanne Lipman writes for the Wall Street Journal:
A Musical Fix for American Schools
American education is in perpetual crisis. Our students are falling ever farther behind their peers in the rest of the world. Learning disabilities have reached epidemic proportions, affecting as many as one in five of our children. Illiteracy costs American businesses $80 billion a year.
Many solutions have been tried, but few have succeeded. So I propose a different approach: music training. A growing body of evidence suggests that music could trump many of the much more expensive “fixes” that we have thrown at the education system.
Plenty of outstanding achievers have attributed at least some of their success to music study. Stanford University’s Thomas Sudhof, who won the Nobel Prize in medicine last year, gave credit to his bassoon teacher. Albert Einstein, who began playing the violin at age 6, said his discovery of the theory of relativity was “the result of musical perception.”
Until recently, though, it has been a chicken-and-egg question: Are smart, ambitious people naturally attracted to music? Or does music make them smart and ambitious? And do musically trained students fare better academically because they tend to come from more affluent, better educated families?
Comments
Nothing will change until there are smart people creating and implementing the solutions. We have too many people attached to theory and not enough to results. In addition there seems to be the constant pressure to find the one thing which will fix everything and that one thing doesn’t exist. That doesn’t stop people from trying to discover that one thing. It may be due to the fact that there aren’t enough smart people to do all the thinking and creating that needs to get done. Instead we have empty headed fools professing all sorts of things which are doomed to fail. How do people really learn and how do they want to learn? Is seems as though no one cares. The system is designed to make it easy for the people delivering the system and not those trying to learn from it.