excerpt from the kcmta Newsletter Vol. 8, #9 June 2008

Joyce Berg, NCTM

We cannot have a successful and effective democracy without intelligent, disciplined, conscientious, and loving people. 

As teachers, we know that music prepares a student for facing life, but what surprises many non-musicians is the extent to which music lessons can train a person. Among the many things that we do as teachers, we are instrumental in changing students’ behavior. When my daughter went to Europe for a Youth Symphony tour, we noticed that the students on our bus were always on time, followed directions, and were easy to handle. The other bus had people late, lost, and uncooperative. What was startling was when we realized that all the people on our bus were all first and second chair performers. The real question that we need to address is how well a person functions. If they function well, then a lot of the other complications and social ills tend to diminish. Isn’t that the real reason behind all the terrible insurance rates and the multitude of lawsuits?

I have a CEO and two adults in managerial positions in my studio and the complaints they have about the young people they hire are explosive. People complain that they can’t get a house built decently because the workers can’t follow directions, are inaccurate, etc., etc. The complaints abound in our society.

Give them all music lessons! Then if you can, get them to gradually put these lessons into their lives.

When we face our beginning students, it’s our privilege to help them gradually stop the chaos.

You’ve heard it a million times.  “We need the arts because …” and then come all kinds of good reasons.  For instance, Yehudi Menuhin said in an interview with the UNESCO Courier that “Art develops the intellectual, physical, imaginative and sensory spheres, and hence all human potential.”  He refers to “art as hope for humanity”. 

And it can certainly be true.

Disturbing as it may be, however, and as Robert Fulford points out, “The arts won’t make you virtuous and they won’t make you smart”.  It’s not a popular thing to say, and it likely will not be mentioned in the Board of Education meetings when art and music teachers have to lobby, yet again, for more funds - if their programs haven’t been cut already. 

Robert Fulford continues,

Great art, alas, has sometimes been loved by monsters, famously the Nazis. George Steiner, the eminent critic, delivers the bad news: “We know that a man can play Bach and Schubert and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning.”  [...] cultured death-camp guards [...] eliminated any foolish belief that great art comes with ethics attached. [...]

On a more trivial level, we also can’t claim that immersion in the arts will create a lively mind. Art education has produced armies of learned bores. [...] As for those who create art, we get it all wrong if we imagine their work makes them admirable in private life.

The arts come “with no guarantees of virtue or enhanced intelligence.”

What, then, does it guarantee? Those who give it their time and love are offered the chance to live more expansive, more enjoyable and deeper lives. They can learn to care intimately about music, painting and books that have lasted for centuries or millennia. They can reach around the globe for the music, the images and the stories they want to make their own. At its best, art dissolves time [...]

There is still hope.