Many parents are aware of the importance of music education for their children. They know that music education helps create well-rounded children who have heightened skills in other areas too – like better language literacy and even mathematical skills. Yes, the lessons from music education can be applied throughout life. Yet, any private music teacher can tell you that the drop-out rate for music classes is incredibly high. Some students only last a few sessions whereas others barely make it past their first recital. One of the main reasons that children are missing out on music education is because their parents are musically illiterate.
Music education cannot just take place in the classroom or with the teacher. Students are also expected to take the learning process home, mostly by practicing. When it comes to other types of education, such as reading or math, we expect parents to help their children with the learning process. Yet, with music, parental involvement is often impossible because the parents do not know how to read music. Without parental support during the critical initial phases of learning music, many students never make it past the novice level because they don’t have help even with the most basic assignments.
The truly sad thing about children dropping out of music instruction is that it leads to a cycle of musical illiteracy. Since they won’t learn how to read or play music, they won’t be able to provide support for their own children in the future. Thus, these children are also likely to drop out of music classes and successive generations will never get the benefits that come with learning music. Since music education is disappearing from our schools at an alarming rate, we can only predict that the cycle of musical illiteracy will take a larger toll on culture. Just think what the world would be like without music – no more concerts, movie sound tracks, or even elevator music!
Obviously, we cannot expect all parents to master a musical instrument just so they can help their children with home assignments. If this were the case, then music teachers would not be necessary. But parents should be expected to learn at least the basic principles of music, like how to read music. Really, parents should have already learned to read music when they were in school – just like they learned the alphabet and to count. As we can see from the music education funding cuts though, society forgets the value of music and doesn’t emphasize that we should learn to read music.
To break the cycle of music illiteracy, private music instructors should encourage parents to attend classes along with their children. While not all parents will be able or willing to do this, it will at least help them understand how important their participation is for the music education process.