Third-Stream Music Education

First, read this post on Edutopia about recent gains in Arts Education funding.

On one hand, I can recognize what a Herculean feat it must be to give every student on every campus in a large district (with a large portion of “inner-city” campuses) forty-five minutes of music and art per week. To have been a leader in this transformation, to look back on the amount of politicking and consensus building and fundraising and budgeting and politicking, must induce a healthy sense of pride of accomplishment. Congratulations to the leaders who took on that task, and hooray for a step in the right direction.

On the other hand, what does it say about our broken system that 45 minutes per week of music and art (or, to be exact, 45 minutes of “Musicandart”) is considered a victory? Forty-five minutes once per week is not enough to build vocabulary in any subject, much less usable performance skills. What if we gave students 45 minutes of exposure to reading once per week? What kind of reading skills, much less love of books and reading for pleasure, could we expect from them? If we gave students 45 minutes of math per week, would we ever have another engineer or architect graduate from our schools? What’s more, to think that “Musicandart” gives either half of that time to music per week and half that time to visual art per week or, worse, one music class every other week is simply laughable. Research in music education, skills acquisition, expertise theory, etc. all points to the fact that frequency of practice is an immutable component in the acquisition of new skills.

Kudos to Dallas ISD, Big Thought, and the Wallace Foundation for winning an important game. Now let’s focus on our strategy for the rest of the games of the season.

Filed under: Aleatory, Recruiting & Retention