Those of you who have heard me speak, know how I feel about music and art education. You also know that I have a passion for making music, even though I have no formal training in composition, and that my son is one of the best high school musicians in the state and plans to study music performance in college.
All of that said, we have just learned that the middle school that my children attended will eliminate its full time music teacher this year and drop the 6th grade band. Apparently, budget constraints are preventing the school from continuing its very fine music program, because of increased expectations from government regulations and continued inadequate funding.
Primary among the responsible is our County Commission, who is funding $14,000,000 less than the School Board asked for. As I’ve reported before, one of Wake County’s continuing challenges is enrollment. 2005-2006 expects to see between 5,000 and 6,000 additional students.
All concerned want what’s best for our children. But in the continuing struggle to balance budgets without impacting on tax payers, a very simple but definite fact is being ignored. Our world has changed and it will continue to change, and the classrooms of the twentieth century will not prepare our children for that world.
How very sad… We don’t seem to value the things that make our lives fuller and richer. At my school, we were fortunate this year to add our some time to our music teacher’s schedule, but it should be more… How are the sports programs doing? 😉
Actually, sports are hurting as well. I don’t want to complain about the expectations of NCLB regulations, because all children must learn to read and to solve problems with numbers. But when the expectations grow each year with new goals, all within the context of declining budgets, you have to pay for it some how. So it costs us music, art, sports, health, social studies, creativity, etc.
You know, when you think about it, the problems that are threatening our world have nothing to do with reading, math, or science. It’s because we just don’t know how to enjoy ourselves in the company of our global neightbors. Sounds like music, art, and social studies to me.
Thanks for the note, Tim, and looking forward to your sessions at NECC.
— dave —
I’m sorry to hear about the folly of your County Commission. Creative training, like music and art, may prove even more important than training children to do tasks, like math, that modern tools can do much better, like computers.
Training the immgination creates a value that no machine can duplicate. Yet, sadly, imagination isn’t something that is easy to quantify, so educators struggle to provide the same easy-to-assess metrics-of-success that standardized testing provides. If creative trainers, like the band teacher, can’t show that their funding is delivering tangible results, then they lose their funding because the gov’t must appear to be acting financially responsible, especially it times of economic instability. What rubbish!
When will government recognize that nothing will help the economy of the future more than investing heavily in the education of the children? It seems like the opposite keeps happening, as the economic pressures grow, the future work force is given less and less creative training, which means there are fewer and fewer graduates with new ideas as to how to tackle increadingly complex problems.