Arts Education is a Social Justice Issue

In just a few hours I will introduce the San Diego Youth Symphony and Conservatory's "Celebration of Music Education" concert. It is the one time in the year when all of our 500 students perform on a single concert. We annually honor a local music teacher for a lifetime of acheivement and provide free tickets to private, school, and university music teachers. We're actually honoring one of our alumni from the 1950s, JoAnn Ford, for her years of teaching music in the schools and privately. 

This year, the local public radio station used the occasion to focus on music education during its morning talk show. Along with our award honoree the stataion invited Dr. Diana Hollinger of San Jose State University, the creative force behind the California Music Project, and Russ Sperling, the VAPA Coordinator for the middle and high school district that covers the entire south end of San Diego County, to speak about the current state of music education.

The transcript of the full interview is now posted here. The most important statement from the 45 minute session got passed over by the host but offers all of us a new argument for the importance of the arts. Diana demonstrates that arts education is a social justice issue. 

Samuel Hope, who's the executive director of the National Association of Schools and Music, he says we have five ways to communicate and organize thought and knowledge. The first one is letters and words, which is our language. And the second is numbers and symbols, which is mathematics. But the next three are still images, which is art in architecture and design, moving images which is dance and film, and abstract sound which is music. And we tend to only place emphasis on the first two. And if a child does not excel at the first two, then we spend more time teaching him that or her that rather than - at the expense of the other three. And so there are other ways besides numbers, mathematics and language, to communicate and to organize sound, and music is one of those. And if we have a child who doesn't communicate well with the first two, then he or she just doesn't do well in the education system as we have it set up today. And, of course, we're going to have students at risk. Imagine if you spend eight hours, as a seven year old, just studying words and numbers and you're bursting to express something and you can't do it. I mean, this is just an accident waiting to happen. And I don't - I mean, we don't - we can't just do a little music. Let's outsource this and sing some songs after school. That's not how you teach. You don't teach algebra that way, you don't teach somebody to read that way, you don't teach science that way. You cannot teach anything that way. So it's very important that you have a structured, you know, step-by-step education so that students have access. Understanding how to read music and to sing music and to play music is access. It's social justice...  

I look forward to seeing Diana again tomorrow during California Music Project activities in San Diego and exploring this idea with her further. I'm sure others have been making this case before and I've just not heard it. Have you?