When students and parents are asked to rate subjects according to their importance, the
arts are unavoidably at the bottom of the list. Music is nice, people seem to say, but not
important. Too often it is viewed as mere entertainment, but certainly not an education
priority. This view is shortsighted. In fact, music education is beneficial and important
for all students.
Music tells us who we are because music is an expression of he beings who create it, it
reflects their thinking and values as well as the social environment it comes from. Rock
music represents a lifestyle just as surely as does a Schubert song. The jazz influence
that George Gershwin and other musicians introduced into their music is obviously
American because it came from American musical traditions. Music expresses our character
and values. It gives us identity as a society.
Music provides a kind of perception that cannot be acquired any other way. Science can
explain how the sun rises and sets. The arts explore the emotive meaning of the same
phenomenon. We need every possible way to discover and respond to our world for one simple
but powerful reason: No one way can get it all.
The arts are forms of thought as powerful in what they communicate as mathematical and
scientific symbols. They are ways we human beings "talk" to each other. They are the
language of civilization through which we express our fears, our curiosities, our hungers,
our discoveries, our hopes. The arts are ways we give form to our ideas and imagination so
that they can be shared with others. When we do not give children access to an important
way of expressing themselves such as music, we take away from them the meanings that music
expresses.
Science and technology do not tell us what it means to be human. The arts do. Music is an
important way we express human suffering, celebrations, the meaning and value of peace and
love. So music education is far more necessary than people seem to realize.