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|  Maple River East Kindergartners take a field trip to Park Street Guitar Lessons Studio to learn about guitar and drums!
"Kids who study music do better in school." The National Association for Music Education "Young children who take music lessons show different brain development and improved memory over the course of a year, compared to children who do not receive musical training." Dr. Laurel Trainor, Prof. of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Behaviour at McMaster University "The life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of the nation, is close to the center of the nation's purpose - and is a test to the quality of a nation's civilization." John F. Kennedy, former President of the United States "Music as a hobby has rewarded me with hours of personal fulfillment." Ryan Lano, Minnesota Lake, MN "Music and lessons have made a difference in John's life." Sue Jones, Mankato, MN The benefits conveyed by music can be grouped in four categories. Success in school and learning
Success in developing intelligence
SUCCESS IN SOCIETY The arts provide one alternative for states looking to build the workforce of tomorrow - a choice growing in popularity and esteem. The arts can provide effective learning opportunities to the general student population, yielding increased academic performance, reduced absenteeism, better skill building, increased self-esteem,development of much needed creative thinking, problem solving and communications skills. – The Impact of Arts Education on Workforce Preparation, May 2002, The National Governors Association “Music has a great power for bringing people together. With so many forces in this world acting to drive wedges between people, it’s important to preserve those things that help us experience our common humanity.” Ted Turner, Turner Broadcasting System
SUCCESS IN SCHOOL and LEARNING
“Music is an extremely rich kind of experience in the sense that it requires cognition, it requires emotion, it requires aesthetics, it develops performance skills, individual capabilities. These things have to be developed and all have to be synchronized and integrated so that, as a person learns music, they stretch themselves mentally in a variety of ways. What we are finding is that the kind of mental stretching that takes place can be of value more generally, that is, to help children in learning other things. And these other things, in turn, can help them in the learning of music, so that there is a dialogue between the different kinds of learning.” – from the Music in Education National Consortium, Journal for Learning through Music, Second Issue, Summer 2003, “What Makes Music Work for Public Education?” - pg. 87 Dr. Martin F. Gardiner, Brown University
“Music is one way for young people to connect with themselves, but it is also a bridge for connecting with others. Through music, we can introduce children to the richness and diversity of the human family and to the myriad rhythms of life.” Daniel A. Carp, Eastman Kodak Company Chairman and CEO SUCCESS IN DEVELOPING INTELLIGENCE
A 2004 Stanford University study showed that mastering a musical instrument improves the way the human brain processes parts of spoken language. In two studies, researchers demonstrated that people with musical experience found it easier than non-musicians to detect small differences in word syllables. They also discovered that musical training helps the brain work more efficiently in distinguishing split-second differences between rapidly changing sounds that are essential to processing language. Functional magnetic resonance imaging showed the musicians had more focused, efficient brain activity. – Prof. John Gabrieli, former Stanford psychology professor, now associate director of MIT’s Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging. (http://news-service.stanford.edu, Nov. 2005)
Young children who take music lessons show different brain development and improved memory over the course of a year, compared to children who do not receive musical training. The brains of musically trained children respond to music in a different way to those of untrained children, and that the musical training improves their memory. After one year the musically trained children performed better in a memory test that is correlated with general intelligence skills such as literacy, verbal memory, visio-spatial processing, mathematics and IQ. Dr. Laurel Trainor, Prof. of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Behaviour at McMaster University, Director of the McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind; Canada; published 9/20/06
SUCCESS IN LIFE
“The arts are not just affective and expressive. They are also deeply cognitive. They develop the tools of thinking itself: careful observation of the world, mental representation of what is observed or imagined, abstraction from complexity, pattern recognition and development, symbolic and metaphoric representation, and qualitative judgment. We use these same thinking tools in science, philosophy, math and history. The advantage of the arts is that they link cognitive growth to social and emotional development. Students care more deeply about what they study, they see the links between subjects and their lives, their thinking capacities grow, they work more diligently, and they learn from each other.” Nick Rabkin, Executive Director of the Center for Arts Policy, Columbia College Chicago; Robin Redmond, associate director of CAP. “The Art of Education Success”, Washington Post, January 8, 2005, pg. A19
“I dream of a day when every child in America will have in his or her hand a musical instrument, be it a clarinet, a drumstick or a guitar. And I dream of a day when there’s no state legislature that would even consider cutting funding for music and the arts because they realize that it’s a life skill that changes the lives of students and gives them not only better academic capability, but it makes them better people. We sometimes forget that many of us in this room, including this guy standing right in front of you, would not be where he is today if not for having music introduced in my life because it gave me the understanding of teamwork, discipline and focus”. Mike Huckabee, Former Arkansas Governor; NAMM University Breakfast Sessions 2007, NAMM Playback Magazine, Spring 2007, pg. 36; www.namm.com
Copyright © 2007 by MENC: The National Association for Music Education. No reproduction permitted without the express written permission of MENC: The National Association for Music Education. All rights reserved. | |
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