Music Education Advocacy Quotes

Music Education Advocacy Quotes

Texas Leaders

Governor Rick Perry
We have encouraged the study of music and the arts in addition to the fundamentals of math, science, reading, and writing, which all have led collectively to tremendous gains in education in Texas over the last decade.

Representative Rob Eissler, House Public Education Committee Chair
For our society to move forward, for our culture to survive, fine arts education must remain strong. We already know that kids who study music do better in physics and math. Teaching the fine arts is a rounding of the whole development of the student.

Senator Florence Shapiro, Senate Education Committee Chair
My vision is that fine arts education would continue to thrive in our Texas public schools. No longer can we look at the fine arts in a box separate from other content areas in the curriculum. Fine arts should be integrated across content areas and vice versa. Just as math teachers can easily bring elements of music into their lessons, so should music teachers take the opportunity to teach students how the elements they are learning relate to mathematics.

Shirley Neeley, Ed.D., Commissioner of Education
The arts are an integral component of our educational system in developing the attitudes, characteristics, and intellectual capacities required for students to participate successfully in today’s society and economy. The arts teach self-discipline, reinforce self-esteem, foster thinking skills and creativity, and promote teamwork and cooperation. Most notably, though, the arts are important in and of themselves in that they are a vital and vibrant part of our personal, social and cultural environment.

Music Education Advocates

Sir Ken Robinson
From his keynote address at the 2007 TMEA Clinic/Convention

Music is powerfully important, not only as an enrichment of education, which it clearly is, but for its transformative possibilities. It seems to me that music and the arts - not on their own, but in concert with other developments in education - give us some sense of what this alternate form of education looks like.

All the talk of how important music is for promoting math or other forms of academic ability to me is tangential. It's important, but it's not ultimately important. Music is important for music's sake. Not because it does something else.

We have grown up with the idea that some subjects do intellect, some subjects do feelings Math and science is terribly important, intellectually. Music is a powerful way to getting one to express oneself.

I believe passionately that creativity is as important now as literacy and we should be promoting it with the same seriousness, but school do not promote creatively routinely.

There is a misconception that only special people can be creative. It isn't true. Everyone has profound creative capacity by virtue of being a human being.

You cannot be engaged in the arts without engaging in other peoples values and ideas.

Music with its transformative power can open our hearts; can enrich our spirits; can enliven our imagination and cultivate a powerful sense of community.