The Importance Of Music Educat Essay Research

The Importance Of Music Educat Essay, Research Paper

A few weekends ago I was talking to a relative of mine who happens to teach music at the local elementary school in my hometown. We were discussing her students and how the year was going for her so far. She had nothing but positive things to say about the children, however I could tell that something was wrong. She explained to me that a lot of music teachers in her department were losing their jobs due to cut backs in the school budget. According to the board of education music is not important enough to put forth the money to support it. They feel that reading, writing and arithmetic are the things that children need to focus on the most. They seem to be looking past the fact that we are not trying to raise a society of robots who eat, sleep, and think alike. We are trying to raise individuals with unique thoughts and creative minds as well as being intelligent people. They are looking past the fact that music nurtures the mind and soul and music education could be a simple solution to the problems in society today. I am a secondary ed. English major and most would think that I d be on the side of the budget-cutters, stating that music should go; but in all reality, and I m sure I can speak for others in that I don t know what I d be without the influence of music in my life. The benefits of learning about music at a young age are incredible. It helps children become well rounded; it supplies discipline; it helps children interact with others; it helps keep a grasp on to our culture; it gives children a way to express themselves and vent. There are so many positive aspects involved in music education that it is unbelievable that it is even an option on the ballot of what gets cut from the budget. This paper will discuss the benefits of music education.

While studying the education of the ancient Greeks I learned that their society was based on the foundation that an intelligent individual not only had skills in mathematics and knowledge of literature but they also were educated in the arts. They frequently studied music in order to maintain a well-rounded education. We have based our education system on the ways of the Greeks and Romans, so why is it changing so suddenly. In a 1996 Academy Award speech by Richard Dreyfus he gave an excellent reasoning on why we must maintain the ways of the past in the education of our children today Perhaps we’ve all misunderstood the reason we learn music, and all the arts, in the first place. It is not only so a student can learn the clarinet, or another student can take an acting lesson. It is that for hundreds of years it has been known that teaching the arts, along with history and math and biology, help to create The Well-Rounded Mind that western civilization, and America, has been grounded on. America’s greatest achievements — in science, in business, in popular culture, would simply not be attainable without an education that encourages achievement in all fields. It is from that creativity and imagination that the solutions to our political and social problems will come. We need that Well-Rounded Mind, now. Without it, we simply make more difficult the problems we face.

I feel that straying from the ways of the past by letting go of music education will make the children of our nation suffer in many ways.

Stimulating the mind of the child is important to all subjects in education. There are proven facts that exposure not only to music education but to music itself will most definitely be intellectually stimulating to a child no matter what subject they are dealing with. Beginning in the mid-90s the country was busy investigating the facts behind the value of music to a student s mind. The Scientific Journal of 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. The study included thirty-six students. They 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; 10 minutes of listening to a relaxation tape; or 10 minutes of silence. Studies showed that performance improved for tasks immediately following the experience of listening to Mozart. The performance of subjects in the Mozart 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 details and intricacy of the music could improve abstract reasoning by reinforcing certain complex patterns of neural activity. Gordon Shaw, one of the researchers in that study, proposes that the music is priming the areas of the brain that may be involved with other tasks. The positive effect of music on the intelligence of 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.

The importance of music in a child’s life can be much less dramatic than increasing intelligence, but even more meaningful. M