Music's Place in Troubling Times

While editing this issue of the KMR, America was witness to another horrible act of gun violence and more political posturing from both sides of the gun control issue. These heart-rending events seem to be coming at an increasingly rapid pace and people are looking for strategies to make it stop. In fact, the Kansas State Legislature got involved in the fight for gun rights and passed a law allowing guns on college campuses. But, I wonder if we as a culture are looking at the wrong thing? While our focus seems bent on stopping these brutal events, maybe we should be trying to address the issues that seem to be causing these shootings in the first place. Only then will we be able to prevent future tragedies.

While guns seem to be the device of choice for killing in our current age, I am more concerned about the angry, hopeless people who choose to end their own lives and the lives of others. Further, while mass shootings make the news, there are innumerable other young people who are feeling anguished and hopeless and are unable to deal appropriately with their emotions. There is a systemic problem within our culture that is producing such behavior. Our children are living in broken homes. The electronic screens they watch for over seven hours a day on average are filled with violence, desensitizing them to others' pain. Rather than actively engaging with others and learning to work together, they are staying home alone and lonely, learning few skills that transfer to adult life. Many of our children feel hopeless, lacking empathy, self-esteem, or an ability to express their feelings.

How can we help these young people? Though schools can't impact a single life as much as a parent or mentor can, they can give all children a place to belong, a way to express their frustrations, and a true sense of self-esteem. And the music classroom is a powerful place for this type of teaching to occur.

This is why you are so important to the children in your school! Music education has the capacity to address the immeasurable knowledge, skills, and feelings that children must learn in order to become confident, cooperative, and well-adjusted citizens. Through a good music education, we provide children with the ability to effectively express themselves when there are no words for what they're feeling. Through a loving, accepting, team-oriented ensemble experience, we help children develop a sense of citizenship and concern for others. Through learning about the context of the music we perform, students learn about other cultures and other views, developing a sense of understanding of others. We teach them to communicate feeling and emotional intent through sound and encourage a sense of self-esteem from a job done well.

My point is that music education has a part to play in preventing the next Sandy Hook or Roseburg. We can operate our classrooms in such a way that we develop a sense of hope and concern for others in our students through learning to communicate with music and communicate through making music. The key is that we must teach children through music, not teach music by using children. The Common Core is not designed to teach citizenship. Nothing is said in the Common Core website about building character and citizenship, but these things are necessary for a child to truly become "college and career ready."
Martin Luther King Jr. said, "The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals." Effective music education has the capacity to meet and exceed the requirements set forth by Dr. King. With the right musical environment, we can teach students to think intensively, think critically, understand empathetically, and live hopefully by building the knowledge, skills, and affect necessary to make music together.