| A Case For Music |
|
By
Allan Miller and
Far
too many school boards and administrators deny that the study of music
is one of the basics of education. Mr. Miller and Ms. Coen provide
compelling arguments to the contrary. When
Wynton Marsalis brought his jazz combo to our college campus recently,
he repeated what he said to the National Commission on Music
Education. "Our nation suffers from a cultural problem more than
a scientific one," he said. "Whether we're behind the
Japanese is secondary. Our culture is dying from the inside."
Unfortunately,
some modern educators are part of the problem. They have forgotten the
call of the founder of our American school system, Horace Mann, who
believed that music was essential to the education of the young for
the development of aesthetic appreciation, citizenship, and thinking.
In today's schools, music as a subject of study is just as
important as it was in Mann's day. But far too many school boards and
administrators do not consider the study of music to be one of the
basics of education. Few students in the U.S. have access to
institutional or private music instruction that involves a balanced,
sequential curriculum. And these conditions have a serious impact on
American culture. Music is valued more as entertainment than for its
contribution to the development of our cultural life.1
America cannot afford to ignore the virtues that the discipline
of music teaches young people. The U.S. school system has been under
attack for some time by business leaders, politicians, and the news
media. Whatever the merits - or lack thereof - of such criticisms,
everyone agrees that our schools should do more to cultivate better
disciplined and harder working citizens. Music is the one area of the
curriculum that has already shown itself capable of doing the job. Ask
former students about the subject that best taught them
stick-to-itiveness, the value of hard work, and the importance of
self- discipline. From those lucky enough to have taken part, the
answer will be music. Consider
the place of homework. Homework has never gone out of style in the
music curriculum. It is impossible to master a musical instrument
without considerable discipline and many hours of practice. Informed
school boards and administrators know this and so work to protect
their school music programs.
Where music programs have been cut, economic crisis has
often remained. In one school district, administrators needed to cut
$156,000 from the district budget. They argued that they could do so
by cutting the positions of five music teachers. However, they failed
to consider what would happen to the students who were then taking
music classes. There were 2,529 instrumental music students in the
district at the time of the proposed cut. As a result of cuts at the
fifth- and sixth-grade levels and in the secondary music program,
overall music enrollment would have dropped to 736 students. Thus
1,793 students would have to be placed elsewhere. The district would
have had to add 29 new classes and hire more than six teachers for
them. When music educators in the district pointed out to the
administration that in order to save $156,000, the district would have
to spend $192,000, the administration reversed the cut.2 In
1991 Lorin Hollander wrote that what many of the recent national
reports on education reflect is that we no longer nurture the
creativity and humanity of our children. We may be destroying
creativity in our nurseries and in the primary grades of our school
systems. It is ironic that, as a growing body of psychological
research confirms the critical importance of music and art for
children, these programs continually come under the knife of
budget-cutters. The problem is that much of the information supporting
the value of music and art is not filtering down to the local level,
where a great many decisions about the content of the curriculum are
made.3
The
primary purpose of including music in the school curriculum is to
disperse its message throughout the culture. Through music, students
team the rich and wordless dimensions of their own cultural heritage.
They discover in the musical heritage of other cultures a common
ground that minimizes national boundaries and language differences.4
Carl
Orff, a noted music educator, regarded elementary music as movement
and play - basic elements in human development. Just how basic became
apparent in a most powerful way when Americans first entered Somalia.
The nightly news programs showed hundreds of starving, naked Somalis
and their children waiting for death. Yet they sang and tried to move
as if to dance. It was the only sustaining force in their nearly spent
lives. Educators in preschools and primary schools must enhance
children's emotional development by giving them opportunities to
experience and express their feelings and the power to control that
expression. Music instruction is one such opportunity. On
a more practical level, one of the hottest teaching methodologies to
hit American schools in the past five years is cooperative learning.
While John Dewey argued in favor of this method in the early part of
the century, it subsequently fell on hard times and nearly disappeared
in the competition-dominated 1980s. Today, cooperative learning is
making a comeback. And it is no coincidence that its comeback
parallels the rush by American business to embrace ideas of greater
worker cooperation.
Of all the disciplines in the curriculum of the American
school, music has the most experience with cooperative learning. While
practicing a musical instrument may be a very lonely experience, most
musical performances take place in cooperative settings, such as
choirs, marching bands, orchestras, and musicals or operas. The
success of each of these kinds of performance depends on the
cooperation of a group of individuals - sometimes a very large group.
Music
in the school curriculum has also always been performance-based. A
movement is afoot in a number of states toward performance-based
evaluation of students' academic learning. Going back to Horace Mann's
time, music in the schools has a 150-year head start in performace-based
assessment. Countless music festivals and band contests have given us
a workable model of performance-based assessment that combines both
quantitative and qualitative elements. Music educators should be
leading seminars to train the rest of us.
The
late physician and biologist Lewis Thomas once surveyed the subjects
that undergraduates study before applying to medical school. He found
that most would-be doctors majored in biochemistry. Among the
biochemists that applied to medical school, 44% were admitted. A much
smaller group of medical school applicants studied music as
undergraduates, but 66% of the music majors who applied were admitted.
This was by far the highest percentage for any undergraduate major.
Thomas claimed that the study showed that medical schools want to
admit people who are steeped in the liberal arts and capable of
relieving stress through playing music, acting, dancing, sculpting,
and so on. Thomas recommended spending the undergraduate years
studying more literature, philosophy, and arts, so that a student who
would be a physician will first grow as a human being.
Howard
Gardner won critical acclaim for his book Frames
of Mind. In it he contends that intelligence exists in at least
seven separate spheres and that competence in one need not be related
to competence in others. Students who are having difficulty in a
certain subject might be encouraged by their teachers to capitalize on
their strengths in other areas to help them overcome their
difficulties.5
The
scientific journal Nature
recently published the results of a study performed by researchers at
the Center for Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University
of California, Irvine. Thirty-six college students were each given
three sets of standard spatial reasoning tasks that appear on I.Q.
tests. The students had one of three listening experiences prior to
completing the spatial reasoning tasks: 10 minutes of listening to
Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major, K. 448, 10 minutes of
listening to a relaxation tape, or 10 minutes of silence. Performance
improved for tasks immediately following the experience of listening
to Mozart. The performance of subjects in the music condition was
eight to nine points higher than their performance in the other two
conditions.
The
researchers suggest that the complexity of the music is the key to the
higher I.Q. scores. The intricacies and complexity of the music could
enhance abstract reasoning by reinforcing certain complex patterns of
neural activity. Gordon Shaw, one of the researchers, proposes that
the music is priming the areas of the brain that may be involved with
other tasks. The positive affect of music on the intelligence of
college students is not permanent; it lasts only about 15 minutes. The
researchers also suggested that making music, rather than simply
listening to it, might have a longer-lasting impact on intelligence.
In any case, the implications for the teaching of music from the early
grades through high school are significant.6
No
matter what it may do for the intellect, a student's education is
impaired if it does not also touch the soul, and music can be the key
to reaching a student's innermost being. The
best teachers have always insisted that music and the other arts
maintain a central place in the curriculum because all civilizations
throughout history have been nourished by the arts. The basic nature
of a people can be found in their songs, images, dances and stories.
To be illiterate in the arts is to be blind, mute and deaf at a most
fundamental level.7
The historian Arthur
Schlesinger, Jr., reminds us that if history tells us anything, it
tells us that the United States, like all other nations, will be
measured in the eyes of posterity not by its economic power nor by its
military might . . . but by its character and achievement as a
civilization."8 The study of music and the arts makes
us disciplined and civilized. 1
Laurie Banon. "Arguing
the Cause of Music Education," American
Music Teacher, February/ ,March 1989. pp. 78-79. 2
John Benham. "Defending.Music
Programs with Economic Analysis.'"
Instrumentalist, August 1991. pp. 14-19. 3
Lorin Hollander, "Music, the Creative Process, and the Path of
Enlightenment," Educational
Forum. Winter 1991, pp. 123-33 4
Gerald R. Firth. "Music's Vital Roles in School
Curriculums," Music Educators Journal, November 1986, pp. 69-70. 5
Howard Gardner, Frames Of Mind,
(New York Basic Books, 1983). 6
Frances H. Rausher, Gordon L. Shaw, and Katherine N. Ky, "Music
and Spatial Task Performance," Nature, 14 October 1993, pp. 611 7
John Brademas, ed., Growing Up Complete: The Imperative for Music Education (Reston, Va.:
National Commission on Music Education, 1991). 8 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., "Arts and Public Policy," in Brademas, p. 3 Allen
Miller and Dorita Coen, The Case For Music in the Schools, Phi Delta Kappan, Vol.75, No. 6, pp. 459-461. Used by permission of
Phi Delta Kappa. Copyright 1994
by Phi Delta Kappa. All rights reserved. |
|
© 2005 TMEA |