THOUGHT REVIEW
General Principles
(1) Music should function early in the life of the child. (2) The primary grades should constitute a period of orientation. (3) By the end of this period talent should have been discovered and analyzed.
Questions to Consider
(1) Why is development of the love of music the principal objective at this age? (2) What voice training, aside from rote singing and speech, should be offered in the grades? (3) Should the piano be favored as the first instrument? (4) Is it possible to have a primary-grade "orchestra"? (5) What is the function of achievement tests in music at this age? (6) What factors have been most effective in putting love of music into the public schools? (7) How can progress in music be enhanced by children's opportunities for performing among themselves? (8) Should any children be excused from participation in musical instruction offered in the primary grades?
Discuss These Situations
(1) Here is a gifted young woman, well trained in music and in psychological and educational methods, zealously devoted to her art, who desires to establish a career as a private music teacher for children. Characterize her procedure in contrast to the procedure of her professional forbears. (2) Here is a young man or woman, similarly gifted, and well trained and critical. What pitfalls of prevalent tendencies in public-school music of today should he or she avoid?
Chapter IV
MUSIC AND YOUTH
There is a distinctively musical period in life: the period of youth. Youth is the age of emotional response and of social awakening, the age of serious play, the age of decision and elimination, the dominant learning period, and the age of freedom and leisure. Before this period the life of the child has been relatively tranquil. After this period the occupational affairs of life are more exacting. Before this period most children participate in music in a routine way without professing it. After this period large numbers of those who have had training or have expressed their enthusiasms in rich participation in the musical life cool off, as it were, and continue their musical activities in a more or less perfunctory way, except for the few who have taken up the art professionally or continue as enthusiastic amateurs.