Music Makes A Difference
By Joan Schmidt, NSBA

In one sense, it’s hard to complain about the wave of classical music that has been washing over the nation as part of the "Mozart effect" craze. What could be wrong about millions of Americans listening to Mozart in the car, in school, in the crib, in the womb? The news is that music makes us smarter, and CD sales have taken off as a result.

The real news may go far deeper, however, and it risks being obscured by people’s understandable fervor to translate discovery into action. The celebrated "Mozart effect" is only part of a vast tapestry of research that has been going on for 25 years, and yet may still be in its infancy.

What scholars are beginning to understand is that a personal involvement with music — listening, yes, but also mastering its theory and practice — is linked to richer synaptic development and higher scores across the academic curriculum. The message so far? School music education, not necessarily a highbrow CD collection, is the key to these benefits.

In 1993, physicist Dr. Gordon Shaw and psychologist Dr. Frances Rauscher published an article in the British scientific journal Nature indicating that people enjoyed a measurable enhancement in reasoning ability for 10 to 15 minutes after they listened to 10 minutes of Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major. In 1997, they published an article in Neurological Research announcing that six months of piano keyboard training caused several days’ enhancement of spatial-temporal reasoning in preschool children. The first discovery generated an avalanche of hype, manifested in ads, CD merchandising and even comic strips. The second discovery, one freighted with educational implications, is the one we should be talking about.

As Dr. Shaw and his team press forward with their work, we are on the cusp of understanding and quantifying the reasons why music training should be a core part of our educational process. The science is fascinating: while working to map brain activity at the subatomic level, the researchers actually found patterns that corresponded to different recognizable styles of music, and they suspect that music may be their window into higher brain function. Very few of us can participate in this high-level science, but it points the way to something we can all do together.

In too many schools, music is considered an optional or elective pursuit, even a completely expendable one. If music were merely a hobby, then this lack of emphasis would be merely disappointing. But if music is a key to better reasoning ability, better math scores, a deeper understanding of science and an increase in engineering school applications, it’s a dangerous folly to let our kids miss out on it.

That’s why music should be part of each student’s day, not as an elective but as part of the core curriculum. Making this happen will be a challenge on many fronts – budgetary, political – but the first battle line is people’s understanding of just what is at stake. Dr. Shaw and his colleagues may spend another 25 years, or more, before they can publish a definitive formula that proves once and for all how music acts on brain function. In the meantime, can your school-age kids wait that long?

There are encouraging signs; for example, the Los Angeles Unified School District has just committed $4.7 million to the development of 45 arts prototype elementary schools. Their experiences incorporating music, art, dance and theater instruction into the core curriculum will pave the way for action in the more than 400 other elementary schools throughout the district in the next ten years. An outlay of $1.1 million – nearly a quarter of the whole allotment – is to be spent immediately on musical instruments.

Not every school district has resources like that, but every school board in the country has reason and will. If English weren’t receiving the attention it deserved, we’d make the right choices to rectify the situation. As we learn more about the importance of music education, we should work to make the right choices there, too.

Those who have lately been cashing in on the "Mozart effect" aren’t really doing any harm – except possibly to obscure the true benefits of this growing field of knowledge. We’ve only scratched the surface, but staggering insights loom just beyond the horizon. In the meantime, if we want to profit from the early returns, let’s do it in our schools.

Joan Schmidt is a member of the Board of Directors of the National School Boards Association (NSBA), based in Alexandria, Virginia.