In today's ultra-political-emotion-driven world, parents have even more challenges than in the past. Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear must know that the public (and most private) schools are halls of indoctrination rather than classrooms for education.
What used to be called the three basic "Rs," Reading, WRiting, and ARithmetic — the skills that teach inductive and deductive reason, the main tool of survival for humans — are given short shrift at best; thus, along with home nurturing in these departments, parents would do well to add art education to their children’s extra-curricular education.
Learning to play an instrument teaches kids discipline and is unmatched for helping to guide cognitive and psychological development because it speaks directly to the sentient consciousness.
The earlier the better, but this doesn’t mean an electric guitar to screech "Rock."
This is for serious mind training so it means classical music, which requires mental as well as physical skill.
The instrument chosen to channel this kind of music's technical and emotional flow is not important, whether it be a piano, a clarinet, a violin, or voice, or (to be clear) a classical guitar which is entirely different in construction, tone, technique, and purpose than a look-alike "pop" guitar.
What's important is learning to play a demanding instrument.
Aside from the joy inherent in the direct participation with highly developed musical forms themselves, the discipline of playing serious music is exact and exacting, teaching the precision of math in a poetic realm, teaching both the exhilarating balance and the exalted integration of "reasoned compositions based on melody and harmony" (music’s form) and "instrumentally expressed sound-articulated emotions" (music's content).
As mentioned, it's not often in our impoverished culture that children are taught reasoning itself let alone uniting reason and emotions.
Tonal, melodic, harmonious music does this. So, the competence to really hear and to appreciate it to a degree made possible by knowing how to play any instrument can be a rare source of indescribable pleasure and safe emotional release for the child now and the adult later.
Like life itself, musical passages contain highs and lows, fast and slows.
Plus, the vocabulary of music includes dissonance-resolution and tumult-sublimity, all emboldening a student in the process of making music to feel to his and her heart’s content within the rational security of a confined experience.
There is no way to fall out of control because the rhythm keeps the music going — the notes must be played on time and accurately — affording an expansive opportunity to learn to channel emotions into a finite structure within a finite time frame.
By learning to orchestrate emotional content through this rigorous structure, the student must learn to merge reason and emotions; otherwise, the resulting music will be cold and sterile, math without the poetry.
Classical music is too mentally commanding to permit the wanton flailing and wailing incited by most pop music today, thus it forces young people to control their emotional output.
Also, because music deals with broad abstractions (triumph, defeat, love, loss) it allows a young person to personalize universals of the human condition, to feel on a grand scale both the hope and the hurt that necessarily accompany an individual life fully lived.
For young teenagers, in particular — who hopefully will have begun music training well before the age of 10 — it unlocks gateways to mature excursions into the ecstasy and the vulnerability of love, the headiness and the hazards of risk.
Often, once young people begin to understand the value of classical music, they turn to it in moments of emotional need to help them experience deep stirrings that may not make it to the surface of consciousness by themselves.
Learning to employ and enjoy the skills of the other arts has superb advantages too.
Music education via learning to play a chosen instrument may be the most helpful in child development because it encompasses (and informs) both reason and emotion at the same time, but drawing, painting, sculpture, and creative writing all stimulate the inventive minds of children to stretch forward into activities that will hone focused attention, observational powers, sensitive sensibilities, specific skills, and overall aesthetic appreciation.
Thus, learning any challenging art form promotes both a curiosity and a confidence that can be transferred to real life situations.
The visual arts offer sensory education.
Writing offers mental education.
Each art form has its own aesthetic vocabulary and appeals primarily to a different sense organ: painting and sculpture to sight (with sculpture adding the tangible sense of touch), music to hearing, and the complex art of fictional story-invention appealing to all of the combined senses through imagination.
Equally important, every art form is rooted in a discipline of craft, and learning the techniques of any craft teaches purpose, observation, structure, selectivity of essentials, and judgment of execution with verifiable outcome.
In other words, the proficiency of means employed as well as the end result can be judged via objective criteria.
Furthermore, all disciplined but ductile art forms can be endlessly manipulated and stylized to express aesthetic emphasis as well as to dramatize ideational content, so experimentation is encouraged, which also gives children confidence in exploring alternatives in every area of their lives.
The formal educational system in America is clearly broken.
It's up to parents to save their children's minds.
Art education will go a long way to achieving that worthy goal.
Alexandra York is an author and founding president of the American Renaissance for the Twenty-first Century (ART) a New-York-City-based nonprofit educational arts and culture foundation. She has written for many publications, including "Reader's Digest" and The New York Times. She is the author of "Crosspoints A Novel of Choice." Her most recent book is "Soul Celebrations and Spiritual Snacks." For more on Alexandra York — Go Here Now.
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