Klarinet Archive - Posting 000083.txt from 2006/11

From: "Kevin Fay" <kevin.fay.home@-----.net>
Subj: RE: [kl] Disgusted, Need to Vent
Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2006 15:08:19 -0500

thomaswinds posted:

<<<I just want to know why, when a kid needs to "lighten up their schedule",
the parents decide to cancel lessons? You know, the thing that takes up a
half hour to an hour of their week (Not counting the practice time...but at
least that can be flexible in the schedule!)??? Instead of packing in
some forever-losing sports team that takes up every day for two hours a day
after school, which of course they can't do when they're, say, 40.....(ever
see a 40 year old field hockey player? Nope, didn't think so. Ever see
field hockey get you a college scholarship? Bahahaha....!)>>>

There are a bunch of knotty issues here.

The easy answer - and possibly the correct one here - is that cancelling
lessons is the easiest action the parent can do. All they have to do is
refuse to write the check, and the music teacher is stiffed. Making the
child forego an extracurricular sports activity is harder for the parent to
enforce, so they don't take that path.

A thornier issue is why the student needs to "lighten up their schedule"?
Cutting off lessons is unlikely to boost the kid's academic achievement; the
correlation between participation in music (including private lessons) and
academic achievement is too strong to ignore. I suspect that there is
something else going on that you don't know about.

I think music educators do themselves a disservice by framing issues in
terms a child's (or a school district's) choice between supporting "music"
and "sports."

First, if issues are framed in this manner, "sports" will always win.
School culture in the U.S. is largely built around athletics. This is an
observation, not a value judgment - I'm not saying that this is good or bad.
(I personally think bad, but that's not the point.) Fighting the athletic
culture is like fighting the law of gravity; while perhaps a noble pursuit,
in the long run it's better to recognize and deal with it as a constant
force.

Second, "music" and "sports" is a false dichotomy. It's apples and oranges,
not apples to apples. The root of the falsity is that people - including
some music educators - look at it as a choice between extracurricular
activities. They're not, and shouldn't be.

The battle is lost long before a child is forced to choose between "music"
and "sports"; it's lost when music is defined as an "extracurricular
activity." There shouldn't be a "choice" between sports and music any more
than there should be a "choice" between sports and mathematics, or science,
or language.

Music *is* an academic exercise. You cannot get a doctorate in basketball;
you certainly can in clarinet. The mindset we should work towards with our
school administrations is not to be treated on a par with the football team
(which again will always be a loser), but with the science department. As
an educational tool, a clarinet isn't like a football, it's like a Bunsen
burner.

IMHO and all that, of course.

kjf

   
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