16 Reasons to Involve Your Child in Music
Compiled by musician Sandra Locklear
MUSIC is one of the Nine Intelligences outlined in Howard Gardner’s landmark educational work, “Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences” (1983)
1. Music is a global language that all people speak – it cuts across racial, cultural, social, educational, and economic barriers, enhancing cultural appreciation and awareness.
2. Music is a symbol system that is as important as letters and numbers.
3. Music integrates basic neurological functions and mind, body, and spirit.
4. Music provides opportunities for self-expression, bringing the inner world into the outer world of concrete reality (performance = independence + interdependence).
5. Music creates a seamless connection between motivation, instruction, assessment, and practical application – leading to “deep understanding.”
6. Music makes it possible to experience processes from beginning to end.
7. Music develops both independence and collaboration.
8. Music provides immediate feedback and opportunities for reflection.
9. Music makes it possible to use personal strengths in meaningful ways.
10. Music merges the learning of process and content.
11. Music improves academic achievement – enhancing test scores, attitudes, self-esteem, social skills, critical and creative thinking.
12. Music exercises and develops higher-order thinking skills, including analysis, synthesis, evaluation, and “problem-finding.”
13. Music (or the arts) is an essential component of any alternative assessment program.
14. Music provides the means for every student to learn (kinesthetic, visual, auditory, global or analytic, random or sequential).
15. Music expands our ability to live with ambiguity and process, qualities of life that all too often are not emphasized in basic schooling, yet which pervade the world outside school.
16. Music expresses the depth of human emotion and gives voice to the height of human aspiration.
MUSIC IS LIFE!!
Sources:
Dickinson, Dee (1993). Music and the Mind. Seattle. Published by New Horizons for Learning / Music Education National Conference (MENC) / Johns Hopkins University.
Dickinson, 1993 #1-13 and Center for Arts in the Basic Curriculum #14-16
The Center for Arts in the Basic Curriculum. A Case for the Arts As A Basic in Education. Missouri: Missouri Arts Education Task Force
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