BTSALP has known this for a long time!! Glad the rest of the world is catching on!
Here’s an article from INC. The Benefits of Playing Music.
Music helps your brain more than any other activity, and learning an instrument increases resilience to age-related decline in hearing.
Find out what Chalkbeat has to say – Extra arts education boosts students’ writing scores — and their compassion.
Here Are 3 Benefits Of Arts Education For Students By Daniel, Parent Herald
1. Arts Education Improves School Performance
One of the biggest benefits of arts education for students is that it can actually improve their learning skills, school attendance, critical thinking skills and creativity. All of these are essential for a successful academic performance. “In fact, several recent studies have concluded that the creativity and innovation utilized in the artistic process will be highly valued by employers in the United States in the coming years as we continue to shift into a global economy,” The Education Fund shares.
2. Arts Education Can Improve A Child’s Creativity, Imagination And Self-Esteem
Nothing can explore and develop students’ creativity and imagination better than arts education. Not everyone likes science, language or math. Many students actually are more interested and skilled at the different forms of art.
Being able to practice your passion, hobbies and interests can also develop your self-esteem. An example is a student at Stevenson Middle School named Cuauhtemoc Lara, who has a troubled childhood, but is motivated to stay at school because he enjoys and excels at arts education, The Columbian reports. “It’s my favorite class,” Lara explained.
3. Arts Education Is A Bridge Across Cultural Differences
One of the most important benefits of arts education for students is that it helps them appreciate and understand the different cultures and values of our very diverse society. “They become the shared link, the glue that shapes our understanding of how we see ourselves and each other,” The Education Fund explains.
Children need art and stories and poems and music as much as they need love and food and fresh air and play. If you don’t give a child food, the damage quickly becomes visible. If you don’t let a child have fresh air and play, the damage is also visible, but not so quickly. If you don’t give a child love, the damage might not be seen for some years, but it’s permanent.
But if you don’t give a child art and stories and poems and music, the damage is not so easy to see. It’s there, though. Their bodies are healthy enough; they can run and jump and swim and eat hungrily and make lots of noise, as children have always done, but something is missing.
It’s true that some people grow up never encountering art of any kind, and are perfectly happy and live good and valuable lives, and in whose homes there are no books, and they don’t care much for pictures, and they can’t see the point of music. Well, that’s fine. I know people like that. They are good neighbours and useful citizens.
But other people, at some stage in their childhood or their youth, or maybe even their old age, come across something of a kind they’ve never dreamed of before. It is as alien to them as the dark side of the moon. But one day they hear a voice on the radio reading a poem, or they pass by a house with an open window where someone is playing the piano, or they see a poster of a particular painting on someone’s wall, and it strikes them a blow so hard and yet so gentle that they feel dizzy. Nothing prepared them for this. They suddenly realise that they’re filled with a hunger, though they had no idea of that just a minute ago; a hunger for something so sweet and so delicious that it almost breaks their heart. They almost cry, they feel sad and happy and alone and welcomed by this utterly new and strange experience, and they’re desperate to listen closer to the radio, they linger outside the window, they can’t take their eyes off the poster. They wanted this, they needed this as a starving person needs food, and they never knew. They had no idea.
That is what it’s like for a child who does need music or pictures or poetry to come across it by chance. If it weren’t for that chance, they might never have met it, and might have passed their whole lives in a state of cultural starvation without knowing it.
The effects of cultural starvation are not dramatic and swift. They’re not so easily visible.
And, as I say, some people, good people, kind friends and helpful citizens, just never experience it; they’re perfectly fulfilled without it. If all the books and all the music and all the paintings in the world were to disappear overnight, they wouldn’t feel any the worse; they wouldn’t even notice.
But that hunger exists in many children, and often it is never satisfied because it has never been awakened. Many children in every part of the world are starved for something that feeds and nourishes their soul in a way that nothing else ever could or ever would.
We say, correctly, that every child has a right to food and shelter, to education, to medical treatment, and so on. We must understand that every child has a right to the experience of culture. We must fully understand that without stories and poems and pictures and music, children will starve.
Written by Philip Pullman for the tenth anniversary of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2012. More from Philip Pullman here.
Why Music?Music is an integral part of our everyday lives, yet we have a very limited knowledge of it. Music Empowers Foundation believes that by funding music programs that clearly foster an appreciation for music, children will reap the benefits of improved academic performance, awakened creativity, heightened self-esteem, and an overall sense of accomplishment.
Study after study proves that regardless of socioeconomic background, music- making students do better in school than those who have no music involvement. Whether it is improved spatial-temporal reasoning, which is integral to math, or repetition of tunes and melodies, which is integral to verbal memory, learning, playing and creating music benefits children in a myriad of ways. ( Music Empowers Foundation )