We pay lip service to beauty. We study poetry, but we deal chiefly with poets—with their being born and their dying, with the shell of them, whereas the poet is only valuable for what beauty he brings us. We even try to extract morals from him, or to find in him codes of conduct, philosophies, and the like, forgetting Swinburne’s fine saying that “There are pulpits enough for all preachers in prose; the business of verse writing is hardly to express convictions; and if some poetry, not without merit of its kind, has at times dealt with dogmatic morality, it is all the worse and all the weaker for that.” One of the prime objects of the study of English should be to instill in the student a love of English poetry. But we are afraid of it; we distrust it, or we think it effeminate. (It means nothing that we are now praising “free verse,” for we are only interested in the first half of the term, and that is not applicable to poetry, since no verse worth having ever has been or can be free. We nibble.)
But poetry does, at least, express itself in words, and words can be punctuated, and spelled, and parsed and scanned, and, above all, words provide material for examinations. You cannot do any of these things with music, for it consists in mere sounds meaning nothing that any one can find out. We do allow music to enter a corner of our educational sanctuary, and then we slam the door on her and leave her there until June when we expect her to come forth garlanded for the graduation exercises. The taxpayer attends these exercises and listens to the singing of the children in that complacent mood which he commonly assumes when he thinks he is getting his money’s worth, although he very likely knows that his own public school education in music did nothing whatever for him.
What are the claims of music as a means of educating the young? To some educational administrators it seems to have almost no justification. “What can be accomplished by it?” they ask. “Singing is not necessary as a factor in life.” “Music is of little importance in a work-a-day world.” So argue the school men who want “results” as they call them. But the real object of education should be first to make human beings capable of hearing and seeing intelligently, and of using their hands skillfully, and then to train the mind so that it can receive and assimilate knowledge and turn it into wisdom. There are a few school authorities who see music as an important part of such education, but most of them—being in themselves unconscious of its power and of its value—only accept it because other people similarly placed have done so, or as a relief from other studies, or as a means of enlivening public school exhibitions. That there is something in our natures which music fulfills and satisfies; that great men have given expression to their ideas through it; that the understanding and appreciation of their utterances depends on the training of the ear and of the imagination, and that, when this training has been completed, a man or woman has access to a whole world of beauty—all this the average school man does not see. Nor can he be expected to see it, for he has never experienced it in himself. But he should be convinced by the phenomena; by the large number of people who derive enjoyment and stimulation from great music; by the persistence of the love for it; even, perhaps, by the colossal sums spent on it. But he cannot dispel his distrust of a study whose results are illusive; he often sees it badly administered, and is unable to remedy the condition, so he leaves it to its fate. The one medium of human expression that is universal, that transcends language, that knows no distinctions save such as it seeks out itself in our own souls; that speaks to the tiniest child and to his grandfather in common terms; that does not deal in beliefs, or in dogma, or in events, or things, or persons, or localities—this he suspects! Put all this on his educational scales; a few lessons in arithmetic will outweigh it. The passion for categorical facts, arranged in methodical sequence term by term, year by year, and culminating in a sky-rocket burst, every fact blazing up separately for an instant as though it really were alive, and then going out while the charred embers fall far apart on a patient earth—this is called Education! But this passion is almost ineradicable—is, indeed, one of the most common of human failings. It is what is called in these days “efficiency”: that is, a sort of nose-on-the-grindstone persistency in detail entirely oblivious of those larger aspects of any case which really decide its destiny. Systems, categories, precedents; these are safe. Why wander from beaten paths? Individual aspiration, a desire for beauty—these are dangerous. We have ceased memorizing the names of rivers, or the capitals of Patagonia and Bolivia, but we still cling tightly to “useful” subjects, and we still test our education by weighing it in June.
I propose, then, first, to examine the claims of music as a subject to be taught in our public schools; second, to examine into prevailing methods of teaching it; third, to investigate the results now obtained; and finally, to suggest ways of bettering our situation.
II. THE VALUE OF MUSIC IN PUBLIC SCHOOL EDUCATION
In the last chapter I referred to the qualities in music which make it especially valuable for children, and what I said there applies with equal or even greater force here. Any one who has compared town or city life in this country and in Europe, and has seen what a pleasure, and what a civilizing influence music may become when it is properly taught in childhood, must realize how great a loss our people sustain by the neglect of singing. We are only now beginning to realize how long it takes to weld a diverse people into one by means of an intellectual conception of nationality. The thin bond of self-interest, the advantage of “getting on” in the world—these keep us together in ordinary times, but in a great crisis these bonds break. The leaven of sentiment is needed. We want a common sympathy; we want above all some means of expression for that sympathy. There have been of late numerous great meetings at which the feelings of men and women have expended themselves in shouts, in cheers, in the clapping of hands, and in other inarticulate methods of expressing emotions. What would not a song have done for these thousands—a song they all knew and loved? Are we forever to be dumb?
Our hope is in the children, to whom music is of inestimable value. In the first place (as I have already pointed out) music supplies the only means of bringing young children into actual and intimate contact with beauty. In the kindergarten or in the early grades of our public schools children are capable of singing, and love to sing, simple songs which, within their limited scope, are quite perfect, whereas their capacity for drawing, or for appreciating forms and colors is comparatively slight. In music children find a natural means of expression for that inherent quality of idealism which is a part of their nature. When children sing together their natures are disciplined while each child at the same time expresses its own individuality. Activity of ear, eye, and mind together tends to cultivate quickness of decision and accuracy of thinking. In the matter of rhythmic coördination alone music justifies itself. Rhythmic movements to music have long since come to be recognized as a means of mental and physical development. All sorts of interesting and stimulating exercises can be used in connection with the teaching of songs to little children, and any one who has ever watched a child’s development through intelligent instruction in singing and in rhythmic exercises must have realized how keen its perception becomes and how valuable to its general intelligence the training is. So important is training in rhythmic movement that it should be a part, not only of all musical education, but of all primary education everywhere.
Singing beautiful songs prepares children by the best possible means for an intelligent understanding of the compositions of the great masters which, for lack of this preparation, many adults never comprehend. The educational administrator who denies a great composer the distinction he gives to a great writer is going against the testimony of generations of cultivated and educated people all over the world, and, moreover, is tacitly acknowledging that he believes greatness to be a matter of mere outward expression. The element in Shakespeare’s writings, for example, which reveals his greatness is the same element that reveals Beethoven’s—namely, an imaginative, beautiful and true concept or idea of human life. Beethoven is as true as Shakespeare. The same fancy, the same daring, the same grandeur, the same extravagance of imagination, and the same fidelity to life are found in each. That one uses words and the other mere sounds affects the case not at all, or if at all, in favor of music, since these elements or qualities of life are expressed more directly and more intensely in music than in words.
Yes, there is every reason for giving music a real place in the curriculum save one, and that is this: you cannot give an examination in it. Fatal defect! No A + or A - for the child to take home proudly to its parents; on a certain day at a certain hour you cannot find out by a set test what, of the beautiful thing we call music, a child has in its heart and soul. The result you hope to gain consists chiefly in a love of good music, and a joy in singing it—a result that is likely to affect the happiness of the child all its life long; the whole tendency of singing in schools has been to civilize the child, to make it happy, and to help its physical and mental coördination; yet you deny the value of such training, you refuse to give it a real place in your curriculum, you call it a fad or a frill. What an extraordinary attitude for an educational administration to assume! The world is, then, merely a place of eating and drinking, of mechanical routine, of facts. There are to be no dreams; the flowers and brooks and mountains, the sky, birds’ songs and the whole fantasy of life—these are nothing. Beautiful objects in which the eye delights, beautiful sounds that fill the soul with happiness and create for us a perfect world of our own, these are useless because they won’t submit to an examination in June and can’t be made to figure in a diploma. How many young people, I wonder, graduate from our institutions of learning with nothing but a diploma? Would it not be of great value to the children if they were taught to see and to hear vividly and intelligently, to be alive to all beautiful objects, to love a few beautiful poems, to have the beginnings of a taste for literature, to be able to sing fine songs, to take part in choral singing, and to know well a few pieces by Mozart or Schubert? Do not all great things establish relationship and do not all little things accentuate differences? What education is better than that which unifies the individual with the universal? Is not this whole world of fine literature, painting, sculpture, and music in the very highest sense, then, an education to the individual?
We march in endless file along a hard-paved way out of the sun, our goal a place where use holds sway. To reach the goal and begin our labors under the lash, catching a glimpse only now and then of stars, of flowers, of brooks, of green fields—only a glimpse, for use holds us fast. After a time we forget them altogether as use fastens its grip upon us more securely. We plod onward, machine-like, until all sense of beauty is dead, and the world is a treadmill of money-getting and of trivial pleasures. Then our blindness reacts on our children. We have forgotten the impulse of our childhood. The love for beautiful things has left us, and we have no longer a sense of their value. Must our children continue to suffer for this? Must they, too, become the slaves of use?