31 August 2009 — Why Teach Children Music?
Richard Gill has a piece in The Age today, about music education in schools (I'll link to it when I can find it online, but it is eluding me so far). In it, Gill claims that music education in Australia is woefully inadequate, and that "children are being discriminated against if they are not receiving a well-planned and properly taught music program". Gill goes on to make the case for quality music education, but he seems to contradict himself a little, or at the very least he tries to have his cake and eat it too.
Activities such as playing Mozart sonatas while they do arithmetic, believing it will make their brains bigger. . . do not constitute music education.
This is fair enough, but there are two things he implies here. The first is that classes that feature passive listening are not the same as either performance or more active listening sessions, and are not as beneficial. I also detect a sense of cynicism at the idea of teaching music for some sort of ulterior motive, beyond the appreciation of music itself, hence the "making our brains bigger" line. He seems to reinforce this reading in the next paragraph:
We teach music to children because of its immeasurable capacity and potency to act on the heart, mind, spirit and soul of humanity. We teach music to children because, in so doing, we acknowledge a heritage which points to the fact that there is almost no civilisation on earth which does not have music somewhere at the heart of its existence.
But then, after this, he takes a new approach:
Apart from the intrinsic reasons for teaching music. . . the evidence from the collected wisom of neuroscience is now overwhelmingly demonstrating that children studying music seriously have a considerable advantage educationally over children who don't study music.
This may be true, although he doesn't actually quote from any study, no doubt assuming that we've already read such studies (here is one article I found in five seconds that supports his claim: It's not by a neuroscientist, but by a music educator). My problem is that I start to distrust arguments in which someone says "it's not about whether or not x is good for y, it's about x's intrinsic value. It also happens to be good for y". By no means are the two arguments mutually exclusive, but that it makes me feel like one of the premises is weaker, and simply being thrown in behind the actual reason.
In this case, the whole cultural argument is moot: if music education makes children better students overall, it should be encouraged. I feel like Gill added the other part of his argument because, as a director for the Victorian Opera, he probably feels like he needs to make overarching statements about how great music is.
And possibly because he was stretching to get the word-count. Surely there is no other reason to say this, when talking about teacher training:
Would you train a surgeon on 11 hours of classes? In some places in Australia, that's the number of hours a trainee primary teacher receives in music education.
Leaving aside the horribly vague "some places in Australia" line, there's a fairly gaping hole in the logic of this analogy. How many hours of training does it take to write opinion pieces for the newspaper?