Band-Aids Where We Need A Tourniquet

There are endless theories on what music education should be, and how the task of introducing kids to high culture should be divided between schools, parents, and arts organizations. In recent years, as school budgets in the US have gotten ever tighter, music has often been the first thing to be cut. At the same time, teachers burdened with ever more stringent national and state curricula have a hard time making time in the school day for anything but the subjects that their students will be tested on at year's end.

As a result, orchestras and other professional music groups have stepped into the void, offering huge numbers of children's concerts, musician visits to classrooms, and other assorted educational activities. These projects, which are expensive to develop and sustain, frequently receive a hefty amount of funding from both public and private sources, and the dirty little secret of cultural grantmaking these days is that if there isn't an education component to your proposal, you might as well not bother submitting it to most philanthropic organizations and state legislatures.

Most in our business would say that despite the challenges they present, these educational outreach programs are unquestionably good things, and that orchestras are fulfilling their duty to their community by stepping in where schools increasingly choose not to tread. But Allan Kozinn at The New York Times has a different, more nuanced view of the way such programs work in his city:

Often halls are rented, musicians are hired and transported, and everything from ushers to piano tuners (and movers) are paid for, all using cash that the city’s Department of Education should be spending on full-time music teachers and instruments. Seen that way, these programs actually deprive students of a musical education rather than help to provide one.

Kozinn goes on to suggest that we need only look to the past to see what we should be giving kids instead...

Back then it was simple: Music was part of the curriculum, like math, science and social studies. Kindergartners and first graders began with singing, note-reading and rhythm-beating, and as the course continued through high school, it touched on the history of music and how it works... Even more crucial, if you wanted to play an instrument, lessons were free, and the school would lend you an instrument until you felt sufficiently committed to buy your own. As interesting as the class work could be (depending on the teacher), the real business of getting to know how music works took place in instrument lessons.

Now, I wasn't around in the 1960s (the era Kozinn is talking about,) so I don't know whether his memory of such quality music ed is accurate or not. But his thesis makes a lot of sense. Most musicians in our business believe fervently in the educational aspect of our jobs, and many of us do additional education work outside of our primary jobs. But when it's entirely possible, even probable, that a kid in our community could go all the way through school without ever being offered an instrument, or a chance to learn how to sing, it does start to feel as if we're banging our heads against a wall.

I don't have a solution to propose here. I know better than to expect that legislators in my state or any other will be eager to raise taxes to support something that political opponents could quickly label an unnecessary frill. It's certainly not my place to tell the voters of Stillwater or Shoreview that they ought to be voting for the local levies that would give their schools the money to fund real music programs. My own local school district (Minneapolis) is in such a deep and perpetual crisis that a lack of arts funding has to wait in line behind such immediate problems as plummeting enrollment, unequal distribution of resources, and a crippling shortage of good teachers. And I have no interest in getting into a pointless debate with the wingnuts who believe that our schools would have plenty of money if only the fatcat teachers and their union would stop hoarding it all.

But I do know that I was the very definition of a problem student when I was a kid. Unquestionably bright, said all my teachers, but unfocused, inconsistent, and profoundly undisciplined in my approach to learning. It was only through music that I learned not only how to play an instrument, but to commit to really learning something, even if it was boring, or complicated, or hard. Music taught me how to think, how to analyze, how to persevere, and how to become truly good at something that, at first, it seemed I had no aptitude for.

I'm no expert. But to me, these seem like valuable educational skills. And I hate the fact that the majority of American kids today aren't getting anything close to the opportunity I had to acquire them.