Why Take Music?
Music Matters
We’ve all seen the research that shows how music aids brain development and makes students smarter. Whether or not you believe in the “Mozart Effect”, one cannot deny the pages of research that links a music education to lower drop-out rates, higher standardized test scores, and better grades in other classes like English and mathematics. Furthermore, participation in a band or orchestra fulfills an essential social need providing students a positive peer group and an opportunity to feel like they belong to a group that is creating something good. All of these positive attributes are extremely important and alone can justify the existence of music education. However, I believe they are but by-products and not indicative of its true significance. In our modern society where we tend to look to technology for our answers, there are times when we lose track of our humanity. Study in the arts is the study of what it is to be human. Continuing evidence is being discovered by anthropologists that music predates not only the written word but perhaps even the spoken word as well. So, as my friends at MGM say "Ars Gratia Artis".
On a personal note, I have been told by college entrance personnel, heads of medical schools, and employers that the characteristics of the type of people they are looking for can be found in students who were involved in their schools’ music programs. I have also known first-hand students who would have had a difficult time in school and have admitted to me that the strong social bonds they made with their friends in music had a profound positive effect on their lives.
New Research Provides the First Solid Evidence that the Study of Music Promotes Intellectual Development
The idea that studying music improves the intellect is not a new one, but at last there is incontrovertible evidence from a study conducted out of the University of Toronto.
The study, led by Dr. E. Glenn Schellenberg, examined the effect of extra-curricular activities on the intellectual and social development of six-year-old children. A group of 144 children were recruited through an ad in a local newspaper and assigned randomly to one of four activities: keyboard lessons, voice lessons, drama lessons, or no lessons. Two types of music lessons were offered in order to be able to generalize the results, while the groups receiving drama lessons or no lessons were considered control groups in order to test the effect of music lessons over other art lessons requiring similar skill sets and nothing at all. The activities were provided for one year.
The participating children were given IQ tests before and after the lessons. The results of this study revealed that increases in IQ from pre- to post-test were larger in the music groups than in the two others. Generally these increases occurred across IQ subtests, index scores, and academic achievement. Children in the drama group also exhibited improvements pre- to post-test, but in the area of adaptive social behavior, an area that did not change among children who received music lessons.
This study is published in the August, 2004 issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the American Psychological Society. E. Glenn Schellenberg is currently with the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto at Mississauga. He can be reached via e-mail at g.schellenberg@utoronto.ca.
Psychological Science is ranked among the top 10 general psychology journals for impact by the Institute for Scientific Information. The American Psychological Society represents psychologists advocating science-based research in the public's interest.
Want Smarter Kids? Teach Music, Not Coding, According to MIT
The latest neuroscience shows that learning a musical instrument increases brain power.
If there's been a theme to the technology industry's plans to reform education, it's that every child should learn to code. This is supposed to allow children to better adapt to a world where computers are omnipresent.
However, there's not much, if any, connection between coding and today's point-and-click environment. Almost nobody in business, for example, requires much programming skill beyond, say, creating a spreadsheet.
Furthermore, the basic coding skills taught in K-12 bears no resemblance to how professional programmers produce code. The "teach kids to code" movement therefore justifies such instruction because it supposedly improves math and language skills.
However, that appears not to be the case, according to a December 2020 study conducted at MIT, which found that: "Understanding computer code seems to be its own thing. It's not the same as language, and it's not the same as math and logic."
By contrast, what actually does increase other skills and brain power is teaching kids to play a musical instrument, according to a January 2021 study conducted at the University of Zürich and published in The Journal of Neuroscience.
A summary of the research (which involved scanning the brains of both musicians and non-musicians) published in Inverse explains that
"musician's brains were vastly more structurally and functionally connected than non-musicians, especially in areas of the brain responsible for speech and sound (especially the auditory cortices of both hemispheres). ...The musical group also showed stronger connections from the auditory cortices to other brain areas in the frontal, parietal, and temporal cortex known to be involved in the control of higher cognitive functions like memory, working memory, and executive functions."
In short, if you want your kids to be smarter, you're better off having them learn a musical instrument or take music education in school, rather than teaching them to code.
Stanford Study Finds Playing Music Can Be Good For Your Brain
Stanford University research has found for the first time that musical training improves how the brain processes the spoken word, a finding that researchers say could lead to improving the reading ability of children who have dyslexia and other reading problems. The study, made public Wednesday, is the first to show that musical experience can help the brain improve its ability to distinguish between rapidly changing sounds that are key to understanding and using language. The research also eventually could provide the "why" behind other studies that have found that playing a musical instrument has cognitive benefits. For the full article, visit San Francisco Chronicle
Disadvantaged students in grades 8-12 who receive an arts education are three times more likely to earn a Bachelor’s degree than students who lack those experiences. National Endowment for the Arts, 2016
Participation in the arts is connected to reducing the proportion of students in a school receiving disciplinary infractions in K-8 schools. Kinder Institute's Houston Education Research Consortium and the Brookings Institution, 2018
“Arts integration leads to deeper learning, including making connections between new learning and previously learned concepts, stronger analytical skills, and enhanced ability to synthesize information into global conceptual thinking.” Mobile Brain-Body Imaging and the Neuroscience of Art, Innovation and Creativity, MM Hardiman, 2019
“We must not fail to create career pathways for students of the arts—career pathways that provide even more reason to stay in school for students confidently moving toward a bright future.” Dr. Kimberly Brown, The Arts and Dropout Prevention: The Power of Art to Engage, 2017
44 states require districts or schools to offer arts instruction at the elementary, middle, and high school level, but only 32 states define the arts in statute or code as a core or academic subject. National Center for Education Statistics, 2020
Audience-based participation in the arts and personal participation in creating art are both linked to higher levels of civic engagement and social tolerance. Journal of Civil Society, Leroux and Bernadska, 2019
Music, dance, painting, and theatre are all keys that unlock profound human understanding and accomplishment.
William Bennett—U.S. Secretary of Education, 1985–1988