 |
 ...for Education Dream by Virginia Euwer Wolff Art by Elsa Warnick "This dream is of millions of children, stretching across continents, every one of them with an instrument. Music is our best peacemaker." ~ Virginia Euwer Wolff |
Why Not a Few Quarter-notes for a Start?
Over here: Listen to this child blow this horn. Over there: See that one's fingers run up and down the clarinet. Watch how the kid to your left puts her whole upper body into bowing her violin. And drums? Never saw so many children snapping sticks in unison.
Band. Orchestra. In schools everywhere.
Kids are natural music makers. Listen to their active games, vitalized by chants and songs.
This dream is of millions of children, stretching across continents, every one of them with an instrument, every one of them now frowning with effort, now grinning with glee. These children meet musical instruments before they learn to read, and they pick up one, then another, then another. They have group lessons and make group songs. They trade around, they try ones that blow, ones that bow, ones that bang, ones that tinkle or tweet. What feels best in their hands? What kinds of sounds make their hearts jostle a bit? Which ones do they think about at night?
By age 7 or so, each child has selected a favorite. Some select two, some three. They have daily instruction, daily they play together in groups. They learn quickly what the conductor's beat means, they discover the exhilaration of accelerandos, the intricately timed repose of a fermata.
Their math teachers are delighted. (Almost any 8-year-old can learn to play 3/16 of a whole note, 6/9 of a dotted half.) Their reading teachers are thrilled. (The attention span of these kids! Even though some of them can't stop tapping their feet or humming during silent reading.) Their science teachers find that they're genuinely motivated to learn about sound waves and frog larynxes and that they keep asking questions about how the universe works. Their physical education teachers have stopped being astonished at how naturally these children take to team work.
In these schools, the number of discipline referrals has shrunk so that the staff in charge of punishing offenses have enough free time to visit rehearsals and try learning an instrument, too. See that grownup over there, awkwardly holding a flute, listening to a fourth-grader explain what an F-sharp looks like?
Of course it's audacious to give music lessons to every child. Not long ago the USA had the unprecedented, audacious idea that every child deserved the opportunity to go to school. Now we can carry it farther.
Listen to the children in wheelchairs playing in the percussion section, using digitalized amplification. See the deaf drummers, perfectly in rhythm with the conductor. Hear the kid who would have joined a gang, now playing his trumpet long and loud and high and proud. Watch the orchestra beginning to rehearse the piece composed by the autistic teenager. See the perishable moments of childhood blaring out brightly, feel the energy of held chords pulsing into the air.
How do we pay for this dream? We use some of the money that used to be allotted for the juvenile justice system. Juvenile detention centers still exist, but they¹re not filling up as fast anymore.
Students do not bring guns to school. What is there to be so virulently angry about?
Music is our best peacemaker. Imagine: Turkish children learning Armenian folksongs. Israeli & Palestinian children playing trombones together. African and Indian violists. Caucasian children playing the Korean Ajaenga with its seven silk strings and bow made of forsythia wood, or the 200-year-old Chinese pipa with its nearly four-octave range. Children whose last names are Schmidt, O'Malley, and Bergstrom-Nabori trying to coordinate their rhythms on the Zimbabwean Mbira.x
Dialogue, not diatribe.
Kids who play music become less afraid to try new things. Once a shy girl who has yet to figure out vowels and consonants has reached for a low B-flat on the cello and found it and played it out loud, she finds her world isn't quite so scary after all. She needs to keep finding it out, day after day. In a few weeks she'll need to play a sequence of half-notes on the C string when her orchestra accompanies the enormous school choir, singing songs in three languages.
And the jokes? Children find fun everywhere. Before and after rehearsals, they laugh and laugh and laugh. A line of quarter-notes can be funny, a repeat sign can become an in-joke. And what happens when you cross a bassoon with a....
Just a few of the statistics:
The College Entrance Examination Board reports, Students of the arts continue to outperform their non-arts peers on the SAT®. In 2001, SAT takers with coursework/experience in music performance scored 57 points higher on the verbal portion of the test and 41 points higher on the math portion than students with no coursework/experience in the arts. Longer arts study resulted in even higher test scores.*
Music is the best stimulator, the finest invigorator, the great healer, infusing unique nutrients into the body and mind and heart. In spite of everything, kids immersed in unspeakable tragedy can feel relief for whole moments at a time if they can share in the glorious cacophony of group music-making.
And mostly, people who make music together do not kill one another.
It's worth dreaming about.
*Source: Profile of SAT and Achievement Test Takers, The College Board, compiled by Music Educators National Conference, 2001, 1996.
Art ©2008 by Elsa Warnick inspired by Text ©2008 Virginia Euwer Wolff
Our New Campaign!
THIS I DREAM
What world will we create for the next generation? What vision will guide our decisions?
Celebrated Authors & Artists share their dreams for our children. Join us in making their dreams a reality.
