National Music in Our Schools Month®

The National Association for Music Education has officially named March as National Music in our Schools Month®! Reminding citizens that all children should have access to music at schools and raising awareness of the importance of music education for all students, this month is one where administrators should commit to learning more about the music programs within their own schools and acknowledging the importance of music to children within their community. As retired educators in our school district, we really do know the importance and the benefit of music to all of the students.

This month, we encourage everyone in our community and beyond to commit to prioritizing the growth of music programs within our schools. The benefits of music to children are tested and proven, and these programs should be growing and flourishing. According to Nina Kraus and Travis White-Schwock in The American Scientist, “playing music offers an unlimited capacity for improvement: Musicians constantly strive for nuance, defter technique, and better synchrony with their ensembles.” To test the theory that music can trigger broader cognitive and sensory changes, they recruited college students, half of whom were musicians and half of whom were musically naive. In the experiment, they began measuring electrophysiological responses to music and speech, finding that “the musicians had heightened responses to the subtle acoustic details of speech, suggesting that music training generalizes to language.” They also found that “the musicians’ brains could encode acoustic details of Mandarin speech too subtle for most English speakers to detect, suggesting that music training might enable a listener to be a more precocious language learner.” To read the entire fascinating article, click here.

For more information about the National Association for Music Education, click here!