The Failure of Traditional Music Education

I received a traditional music education. It worked for me. But I am an exeption. And when I say it worked for me, I mean that if I have a piece of music in front of me and the appropriate instrument in my hands I can play. But, up until recently I was terrified to express myself away from the page.

In traditional music lessons the students are taught how to read music as a means of learning how to play music. And technique is stressed from the very beginning. What this often produces is frustrated students who really just want to play music.

I say, let them play. I think we should be following a model similar to that which is demonstrated when children learn to speak. A child hears speach, learns to babble, starts to form words, then sentences, and finally, speaks fully by the age of 3 or 4. Only after that are they taught to read and spell. This educational model has produced overwhelming success. The vast majority of children learn to speak effectively.

Let's compare that to the traditional music education model. Children begin music education, often piano, at an early age. They are forced into multi-level thinking from the very beginning. They must understand and interpret the written symbols indicating pitch and rhythm from the very beginning. This requires a very complicated thought process. There are consequences to this. Most children hate piano lessons and quit playing forevermore from the day their parents stop forcing them to attend. The failure rate of traditional music education is astounding, possibly more than in any other academic arena. How many adults do you know who still play piano after having lessons as a child? I'll bet its not many. As of 1994, there were 11 million unused pianos in the United States.

So, again I say, let them play. Let's teach music the same way we teach speech. Let's demonstrate music-making and then help our students take baby steps in the direction of musical expression without criticizing the results. We can encourage progress, and then when the student has a good musical vocabulary on their instrument, let's introduce reading. I'll bet that if we were to do this with our students, we would end up with a population of people who were able to and interested in expressing themselves musically, even years later.