"You can't have a really high-quality scholastic environment without the arts." -Rudy Crew, former chancellor of NYC Public Schools.
"Music allows us to celebrate and preserve our cultural heritages and also to explore the realms of expression, imagination, and creation resulting in new knowledge. Therefore, every individual should be guaranteed the opportunity to learn music and to share in musical experiences." -Preamble to the Mission Statement of the National Association for Music Education.
"Music is the manifestation of the human spirit, similar to language. Its greatest practitioners have conveyed to mankind things not possible to say in any other language. If we do not want these things to remain dead treasures, we must do our utmost to make the greatest possible number of people understand their idiom." -Zoltan Kodaly, early music educator and author of the Kodaly method of teaching music.
Music can enhance spatial-reasoning ability. Four groups of preschoolers were studied: group 1 received piano lessons, group 2 received singing lessons, group 3 received computer lessons, and group 4 received no special training. Group 1 (piano lessons) performed 34% higher on tests measuring spatial-temporal ability than the others. These findings indicate that music uniquely enhances higher brain functions required for mathematics, chess, science, and engineering. These students better understood the concepts of proportion (heavily used in math and science), which had never been achieved by any program in public schools. This study also indicates that music training generates the neural connections used for abstract reasoning, including those necessary for understanding mathematical concepts. -Neurological Research, February 1997.
The Kodaly system of music education was instituted in Hungarian schools in the 1960s. Today there are no 3rd graders (in Hungary) who cannot sing on pitch and sing beautifully. -Music and the Mind by Dee Dickenson, 1993.
The foremost technical designers and engineers in Silicon Valley are almost all practicing musicians. -Music and the Mind by Dee Dickenson, 1993.
"We are all born rhythmical people - we lived with our mother's heartbeat for nine months before we were born. We all live with the rhythms of our respiration and heartbeat. The human body and voice has surely been used in early artistic self-expression not only by ancient humans, but by every child today." -Music and the Mind by Dee Dickenson, 1993.
"One study of the effects of the Yamaha [K-1 music instruction] program in the Downey, California Unified School District showed that the reading level of first-grade students with a single year of music was nearly one grade higher than their peers; those with two years of music scored at almost the third-grade level; and some students scored as high as fourth and fifth-grade levels."
-Growing up Complete: The Imperative for Music Education, from the Report of the National Commission on Music Education , March 1991.
"When my children were learning music in school, they had to learn other things; to sit still, to listen, to pay attention, to concentrate with music. You don't learn just music; you learn many things." -Jackie Richmond, parent, Chicago Forum, as reported in Growing up Complete: The Imperative for Music Education, from the Report of the National Commission on Music Education, March 1991.
"In 1987-89, students taking music courses scored an average of 20-40 points higher on both verbal and math portions of the SATs than students who took no arts courses. Similarly, in a recent study the College Entrance Examination Board reported a direct correlation between improved SAT scores and the length or time spent studying six academic subjects, including 'Arts and Music.' Students with 20 units of study in the six areas scored 128 points higher on the SAT Verbal than those with 15 units; on the math portion, the difference was 118 points. Students who took more than four years of music and the other arts scored 34 points better on verbal SATs and 18 points better on math SATs in 1987-89 than those who took music for less than one year."
-Growing up Complete: The Imperative for Music Education, from the Report of the National Commission on Music Education , March 1991.
"Students with coursework/experience in music performance and music appreciation scored higher on the SAT: students in music performance scored 57 points higher on the verbal and 41 points higher on the math than did students with no arts participation." -College-Bound Seniors National Report: Profile of SAT Program Test Takers, The College Entrance Examination Board, Princeton, NJ, 2001.
"A study in 1952 reported that when examining 278 eighth and ninth graders, the use of background music in study halls resulted in substantially more improvement of reading comprehension than those that studied without music." -An Intelligence View of Music Education by Dr. Arthur Harvey, University of Hawaii (Manoa)
"In a study by Frances Rauscher and Gordon Shaw at the University of California, Irvine, that was presented in 1994 at the American Psychological Association, they reported that pre-schoolers who took daily 30 minutes group singing lessons and a weekly 10-15 minute private keyboard lesson scored 80 percent higher in object-assembly skills than students who did not have the music lessons." -An Intelligence View of Music Education by Dr. Arthur Harvey, University of Hawaii (Manoa)
"An article in the July 1990 Instrumentalist states that music majors have the highest rate of admittance to medical school, higher than any other subject area including biochemistry, chemistry, and physics. The article quotes facts and figures from a Rockefeller Foundation study and concludes by suggesting that students eager to be admitted to medical school should be music majors." -Research Report by Randy Royer, as reported in the Wyoming MEA Journal (1991).
The U. S. Department of Education lists the arts as subjects that college-bound middle and junior high school students should take, stating "Many colleges view participation in the arts and music as a valuable experience that broadens students' understanding and appreciation of the world around them. It is also well known and widely recognized that the arts contribute significantly to children's intellectual development." In addition, one year of Visual and Performaing Arts is recommended for college-bound high school students. -Getting Ready for College Early: A Handbook for Parents of Students in the Middle and Junior High School Years, U. S. Department of Education, 1997.