On June 16th, Senate passed the Every Child Achieves Act, a new, bipartisan Elementary and Secondary Education Act proposal. The most notable part of the act is it names the arts and music as core subjects. According to a press release by the National Association for Music Education (NAfME), this is a huge step to ensuring that students of all different socioeconomic backgrounds have access to music education.
I strongly believe that music is a necessity in education. It has been suggested time and time again that music in schools has academic benefits, but I feel more importantly, music teaches important life lessons and raises self-esteem.
In high school, I was blessed to attend a school that placed a strong emphasis on the arts. I was heavily involved in both my band and chorus programs, and even though I didn't choose to pursue a career in music, it has shaped who I am today. I believe the most important lessons I have learned in life were learned in the music wing.
Music has taught me how to work with a team. When you're part of an ensemble, you have a lot of responsibility placed on you to know your part. In order to work together, everyone has to take the responsibility to do his/her equal work, or you compromise the quality of the entire group. There is no consistent leader that is going to carry everyone else. This will be true for every group you will ever work in. Everyone is responsible for his/her own work and can't expect to be carried.
Through music, I have learned persistence. When you first pick up a piece of music, you can't play or sing it right off the bat. It takes a lot of practice. I learned to methodically take pieces apart and slowly put them back together, as grueling as that could be. That has affected how I face any challenge in life. I know that nothing comes easy, and I need to put the work in if I want it to get easier. You can't just give up if something doesn't work out at first. Rome wasn't built in a day.
The most important lesson I have learned through music is it's okay to fail. I can't even begin to count how many auditions for honors groups or solos I took in high school, and I can't even think how many of those I "failed" at. When I first started to take auditions, I was heart broken and hard on myself every time it didn't go my way. After awhile, I learned that all those "failures" weren't necessarily bad things. I had to get into the mindset that at least I had tried, and if I had done my best, and that wasn't enough, then oh well. I can't even begin to stress how important knowing that is to me now. I have learned to deal with rejection and how to use it to better myself. This has made me more willing to put myself out there and try things that I would never have before.
Even with all those lessons, the part of me I owe most to music is my self-esteem. According to the theory of multiple intelligences, intelligence is not concrete and comes in different forms. There are the more academically conventional intelligences like logical and verbal, but there are also intelligences not covered in the standard education curriculum, one of them being musical intelligence. Some people are more in tune with different kind of intelligences. If you aren't as in tune with your logical and verbal intelligences, school can be discouraging. Having music in schools gives students who excel in music an outlet. Even if they are struggling with their academics, they have something that gives them a sense of achievement. The confidence I gained through music gave me more confidence in my academics. Maybe they didn't come as naturally to me as they did to other students, but I had learned how to work hard and how to learn from mistakes.
Now I am in college, I carry all the lessons I have learned with me. They have made me into the student and the person I am today, and I'm proud of that. There is so much to learn through music education, and every student, no matter what their background, deserves the opportunity to explore.
