Arts and education

As I stood jammed tight in a crowd of swooning, crooning women outsinging Lionel Ritchie at last night’s Jamaica Jazz and Blues Festival in Montego Bay, I had a thought: “What if we were to use music to educate Jamaican children?”

Throughout his show, Ritchie had stopped and stared incredulously at the audience that knew every word of every song he sang, every pause, inflection and nuance of the recording – from the first note to the last, the audience knew it. There is something about music that makes us remember and recall, that makes us feel good and connect emotionally. No one last night had time to fuss or fight – all were caught up in the music of the moment, for almost two hours of rapture and bliss.

I got deeper insight this morning when I opened an e-mail that detailed a program in Venezuela called El Sistema. The article reads in part:

In the poor hillside neighborhood of Chapellín and at nearly 250 other locales throughout this nation, tens of thousands of young Venezuelans are learning to play classical music and to make art a permanent cornerstone of their lives. They're the latest recruits of El Sistema, or the System, a 34-year-old program that many regard as a model not only for music instruction but for helping children develop into productive, responsible citizens.

El Sistema is the brainchild and lifelong spiritual mission of José Antonio Abreu, 69, an economist and politician. When he started the program in the early 1970s, with 11 children and a handful of volunteers operating out of a garage, a few skeptics scoffed at the idea of imparting classical music to the disadvantaged. Today, around half a million children are enrolled in El Sistema's training centers, called nucleos, and the program has been copied throughout Latin America and in Europe. "Art education is an essential component of the educational system," says Abreu, a deceptively soft-spoken man with the fiery social conscience of a Jesuit reformer, speaking at El Sistema's central offices here. "It cannot be a peripheral element. It's not possible that a child would have access to an arts education as an option, by accident or out of charity. Because an aesthetic formation is that which touches our sensibility. Art and religion influence, definitely, the formation of our values."

The Jamaican education system is woefully lacking in attention to the arts. Few schools have meaningful music programs, where children are trained in the rudimentaries of music. There is only one tertiary institution devoted to the arts. Art is a viewed as a subject for those who don’t have the “smarts” for science. There is little or no incorporation of the God-given human talent for artistic expression and creativity in the pedagogy. It is chalk and talk. No sing, dance, draw, play and learn.

I have read that there is a neurological similarity between math and music i.e. the brain functions and uses the same patterns for learning math as for music. My actuary friend once explained it somewhat simplistically to my math-challenged, yet music-loving mind that music is all about rhythm and pattern and so is math. Big learning for me!

My mind has been running wild all morning – could we teach spelling and reading by singing? Could we teach math through music and biology through dance? Could we teach English and Geography through art? History through drama? I am not a trained teacher, which may be why I feel free to ask such questions. As I watch and listen to my 13 year old son who is totally demotivated by the boredom and drudgery of his sedentary curriculum-bound teachers, learn every popular song word for word in no time flat, I somehow believe that this could be a missing link in true, abiding education of our nation’s children.

I am further fascinated by Sr. Abreu’s statement: "an aesthetic formation is that which touches our sensibility. Art and religion influence, definitely, the formation of our values." Could the much touted decline of values in our society have anything to do with the decline, or indeed absence of and inattention to the arts in our society? Could the aggressiveness, the intolerance and the violence in our society possibly be related to the lack of "aesthetic formation"?

We need to ask different questions about our education system. We need to stop asking questions like "What’s wrong with the children of today" and "Why can’t boys sit still and learn" and "Why are girls outperforming boys" and instead ask questions about what motivates and engages our children, what interests them, how we can build on that and redesign our education system around those responses. Our children are already learning – if we want them to learn different things, then we need to use the approaches that engage and inspire them. I would love them to feel the same bliss and rapture that Lionel Ritchie's audience felt last night as they are being educated. Then, they will be truly motivated - not by others, but by their true inner selves.