In just a few hours I will introduce the San Diego Youth Symphony and Conservatory’s “Celebration of Music Education” concert. It is the one time in the year when all of our 500 students perform on a single concert. We annually honor a local music teacher for a lifetime of acheivement and provide free tickets to private, school, and university music teachers. We’re actually honoring one of our alumni from the 1950s, JoAnn Ford, for her years of teaching music in the schools and privately.
This year, the local public radio station used the occasion to focus on music education during its morning talk show. Along with our award honoree the stataion invited Dr. Diana Hollinger of San Jose State University, the creative force behind the California Music Project, and Russ Sperling, the VAPA Coordinator for the middle and high school district that covers the entire south end of San Diego County, to speak about the current state of music education.
The transcript of the full interview is now posted here. The most important statement from the 45 minute session got passed over by the host but offers all of us a new argument for the importance of the arts. Diana demonstrates that arts education is a social justice issue.
Samuel Hope, who’s the executive director of the National Association of Schools and Music, he says we have five ways to communicate and organize thought and knowledge. The first one is letters and words, which is our language. And the second is numbers and symbols, which is mathematics. But the next three are still images, which is art in architecture and design, moving images which is dance and film, and abstract sound which is music. And we tend to only place emphasis on the first two. And if a child does not excel at the first two, then we spend more time teaching him that or her that rather than – at the expense of the other three. And so there are other ways besides numbers, mathematics and language, to communicate and to organize sound, and music is one of those. And if we have a child who doesn’t communicate well with the first two, then he or she just doesn’t do well in the education system as we have it set up today. And, of course, we’re going to have students at risk. Imagine if you spend eight hours, as a seven year old, just studying words and numbers and you’re bursting to express something and you can’t do it. I mean, this is just an accident waiting to happen. And I don’t – I mean, we don’t – we can’t just do a little music. Let’s outsource this and sing some songs after school. That’s not how you teach. You don’t teach algebra that way, you don’t teach somebody to read that way, you don’t teach science that way. You cannot teach anything that way. So it’s very important that you have a structured, you know, step-by-step education so that students have access. Understanding how to read music and to sing music and to play music is access. It’s social justice…
I look forward to seeing Diana again tomorrow during California Music Project activities in San Diego and exploring this idea with her further. I’m sure others have been making this case before and I’ve just not heard it. Have you?
Oh, heck, through all of my k-12 education I was hammered at about math. I’m not proud, but I cheated on math exams to get out of college. Math was all that stood in the way after six and a half years of full time schooling. Never did well in it. I don’t know why. It was just a horrible experience, period. Didn’t apply myself? Not that simple. As an adult, I still have trouble doing even simple math. But I did get an MFA and I can paint and I can draw and sometimes the results are not bad.
But I don’t make the economy much money, unless you count the paltry bit spent on supplies. I don’t contribute to technological development. And, of course, I am an artist. An infantilized human being, at once admired and dismissed.
Let me tell you: art will always suffer in education because it is a tiny fraction of the economy. Because artists will always—in the United States—be seen as creatures who are pitiable and contemptible and impractical and irrational and corrupt. People will tell you the opposite: they don’t want to DIRECTLY offend. It matters not that what we make draws ’em into museums, performance halls, theaters. We are not needed, really. (It also doesn’t help that certain artists don’t demand what they are worth, whether it’s a gallery taking 50% or donating performances for nothing or accepting nothing much for performances or artwork. But this is another subject.)
Arguing for arts education as social justice and begging for recognition and funding will do some good, though. Just not enough. Time to leave for Europe.
….and then you have the radicals one who say that ultimately mathematics is the only language