New Thought for Advocacy
In Charles Fowler's (1991) article, Finding the Way to Be Basic, the following paragraph caused me to reflect:
In many of today's schools, there is too little opportunity for certain students to explore the
world through other forms of intelligence--musical, spatial, bodily/kinesthetic, and the
personal intelligences of knowling oneself and others--as Howard Gardner framed them.
This is one of the reasons that students rebel and drop out. Were Edison and Ford great
readers? Was Beethoven good at addition? Was Picasso a great speller? Was Balanchine a
master of English? These humans changed the world, but not from minds based on
linguistic or mathematical intelligence. (p. 11)
Ever since I read this article on Wednesday, I have been thinking about how many students have been shortchanged through an educational system that does not value the contribution of artists to society. By giving students only 30-40 minutes per week of music instruction, we are not giving future musicians a fair shot at expanding upon their musical intelligence and seeing it through to its potential. I wonder, how many future Mozarts or Beethovens has society missed out on because of this? Fowler makes an excellent case for advocating "music for music's sake."
posted by jodi m @ 1:12 PM
2 Comments:
While I do agree with you that, in most school systems, students do not get enough of the arts, I believe that students are given tools which they can choose to follow through if they enjoy it. This is not to say that I would like more music classes for the students to take, but I also believe that every students should experience many different areas of study, and that's where some of the conflict occurs.
Another issue is that people sometimes think if students enjoy the arts so much they should think about private insturction. While that may be ideal, in many instances families do not have money to support that, as well as time in people's schedules to fit it all in.
We live in a culture that promotes "well-roundedness", hindering people to not be able to dive deep into most things. This is shown with the inability to offer more things (though it is also due to lack of money).
Hopefully, these future Mozart's and Picasso's, and Balanchine will be able to experience the joys of music in the classroom and, with the help of teachers or collegues, be able to foster this talent.
To comment on Heather's comment, I am not advocating that students not be given the opportunity to explore reading, spelling, math, English, etc.; rather, I am suggesting that the arts should be treated as equal to the other disciplines, so that students can explore more fully those other forms of intelligence that Fowler's (1991) article pointed out. It would be interesting to see what a different culture we would have here in America if the arts took a place in education equal to the three R's.
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