Many
solutions have been tried, but few have succeeded. So I propose a
different approach: music training. A growing body of evidence suggests
that music could trump many of the much more expensive “fixes” that we
have thrown at the education system.
Plenty
of outstanding achievers have attributed at least some of their success
to music study. Stanford University’s
Thomas Sudhof,
who won the Nobel Prize in medicine last year, gave credit to his
bassoon teacher.
Albert Einstein,
who began playing the violin at age 6, said his discovery of the
theory of relativity was “the result of musical perception.”
Until
recently, though, it has been a chicken-and-egg question: Are smart,
ambitious people naturally attracted to music? Or does music make them
smart and ambitious? And do musically trained students fare better
academically because they tend to come from more affluent, better
educated families?
New research provides
some intriguing answers. Music is no cure-all, nor is it likely to turn
your child into a Nobel Prize winner. But there is compelling evidence
that it can boost children’s academic performance and help fix some of
our schools’ most intractable problems.
Music raises your IQ.
E. Glenn Schellenberg,
a University of Toronto psychology professor, was skeptical about
claims that music makes you smarter when he devised a 2004 study to
assess its impact on IQ scores. He randomly assigned 132 first-graders
to keyboard, singing or drama lessons, or no lessons at all. He figured
that at the end of the school year, both music and drama students would
show bumps in IQ scores, just because of “that experience of getting
them out of the house.” But something unexpected happened. The IQ scores
of the music students increased more than those of the other groups.
Another
Canadian study, this one of 48 preschoolers and published in 2011,
found that verbal IQ increased after only 20 days of music training. In
fact, the increase was five times that of a control group of
preschoolers, who were given visual art lessons, says lead researcher
Sylvain Moreno,
an assistant professor of psychology at the University of
Toronto. He found that music training enhanced the children’s “executive
function”—that is, their brains’ ability to plan, organize, strategize
and solve problems. And he found the effect in 90% of the children, an
unusually high rate.
The
Harmony Project in Los Angeles gives free instrument lessons to
children in impoverished neighborhoods.
Margaret Martin,
who founded the program in 2001, noticed that the program’s
students not only did better in school but also were more likely to
graduate and to attend college.
To
understand why, Northwestern University neurobiologist
Nina Kraus
spent two years tracking 44 6-to-9-year-olds in the program and
then measured their brain activity. She found a significant increase in
the music students’ ability to process sounds, which is key to language,
reading and focus in the classroom. Academic results bore that out:
While the music students’ reading scores held steady, scores for a
control group that didn’t receive lessons declined.
Prof.
Kraus found similar results in a 2013 study published in Frontiers in
Educational Psychology of 43 high-school students from impoverished
neighborhoods in Chicago. Students randomly assigned to band or choir
lessons showed significant increases in their ability to process sounds,
while those in a control group, who were enrolled in a junior ROTC
program, didn’t. “A musician has to make sense of a complicated
soundscape,” Prof. Kraus says, which translates into an ability to
understand language and to focus, for example, on what a teacher is
saying in a noisy classroom.
Music training does more than sports, theater or dance to improve key academic skills.
Last
year, the German Institute for Economic Research compared music
training with sports, theater and dance in a study of 17-year-olds. The
research, based on a survey of more than 3,000 teens, found that those
who had taken music lessons outside school scored significantly higher
in terms of cognitive skills, had better grades and were more
conscientious and ambitious than their peers. The impact of music was
more than twice that of the other activities—and held true regardless of
the students’ socioeconomic background.
To
be sure, the other activities also had benefits. Kids in sports also
showed increased ambition, while those in theater and dance expressed
more optimism. But when it came to core academic skills, the study’s
authors found, the impact of music training was much stronger.
Music can be an inexpensive early screening tool for reading disabilities.
Brazilian
music teacher
Paulo Estevao Andrade
noticed that his second-grade students who struggled with rhythm
and pitch often went on to have reading problems. So he invented a
“game” in which he played a series of chords on a guitar and asked his
students to write symbols representing high and low notes. Those who
performed poorly on the exercise, he found, typically developed severe
reading problems down the line.
Intrigued,
he joined with
Nadine Gaab,
an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, to follow 43
students over three years, and they found that the test predicted
general learning disabilities as well. Why? Mr. Andrade notes that the
brain processes used in the music test—such as auditory sequencing
abilities, necessary to hear syllables, words and sentences in order—are
the same as those needed to learn to read. Prof. Gaab says the test,
which is simple and inexpensive to administer, has great potential as a
tool for early intervention.
Music literally expands your brain.
In
a 2009 study in the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers used an MRI to
study the brains of 31 6-year-old children, before and after they took
lessons on musical instrument for 15 months. They found that the music
students’ brains grew larger in the areas that control fine motor skills
and hearing—and that students’ abilities in both those areas also
improved. The corpus callosum, which connects the left and right sides
of the brain, grew as well.
Ellen Winner,
a Boston College psychology professor and co-author of the study,
notes that the study doesn’t show a rise in cognitive abilities. But
she argues that music shouldn’t have to justify itself as an academic
booster. “If we are going to look for effects outside of music, I would
look at things like persistence and discipline, because this is what’s
required to play an instrument,” she says.
Yet
music programs continue to be viewed as expendable. A 2011 analysis in
the Journal of Economic Finance calculated that a K-12 school music
program in a large suburban district cost $187 per student a year, or
just 1.6% of the total education budget. That seems a reasonable price
to pay for fixing some of the thorniest and most expensive problems
facing American education. Music programs shouldn’t have to sing for
their supper.
— Ms. Lipman is
co-author, with
Melanie Kupchynsky,
of “Strings Attached,” published last month in paperback by
Hachette Books. She is a former deputy managing editor of The Wall
Street Journal and former editor in chief of Condé Nast Portfolio.
