Music Education is Not (Really) Education.

from an early age i was encouraged by my
family to study music i was given a lot of positive reinforcement to listen to music to dance to music to sing the lyrics to songs that would be playing on the radio some of my earliest childhood memories were singing and dancing with my family a lot of joyous times a lot of clapping smiling just a lot of happiness that i could sense with the family that my parents were happy to see me dancing and singing that my older brothers were also finding it very cute right so this was the start this was the genesis of my interest in music likewise i had a lot of positive reinforcement for my older brothers to play video games this was a big part of my childhood so unlike the kind of glamorization or glorification of the study of music that i saw this as something serious that this is something to take with a kind of pride that i'm studying music that i'm playing music this is something that's not so easy right um i even felt it was more important to study music and more of a challenge than to participate in team sports so i had a little bit of experience with team sports and i chose instead to spend my extracurricular time and the classes that i chose in high school the electives that i chose were 100 music based they require an orchestra and in addition to studying and learning how to play the instrument of the violin i also learned guitar on my own and played in bands with friends and had competitions where i would play music whether it was keyboard guitar singing this kind of thing i would do with friends of mine so from a young age i really always thought that music was something that was a good use of your time that was a good use of my time and i didn't really question whether it was a good use of my time or not and by contrast i always knew that video games were a poor use of my time i knew that they weren't going to equip me with life skills i wasn't that delusional that i thought that if i played super mario that this would somehow build my cognition that it would improve my mental alacrity that it would benefit me in some way with my future but still i got a lot of positive reinforcement for it so it was something that i continued to do into my early 20s i have had to question how i spent my time in my youth i think a lot of people might be very much emotionally attached to how they spent their childhood what their parents encouraged them to pursue outside of their studies outside of what you are supposed to do in terms of passing your classes and going to college after high school we have this really strong feeling that if anybody questions what i was doing with my time that they're me and they're not being very uh polite right and i didn't have anybody that was providing that input any time that i would talk about what i was doing in my extracurricular time most of them thought like oh well you'll do well i never had people that were concerned about the use of my time whether i was using my intellectual abilities to improve my life or make it so that i would be more successful once i got out of this highly structured situation in high school where everything is very scheduled you have to follow the rules and once you're out of school once you even go to college you have to be on your own you have to have the kind of attitude and drive and determination that you you don't have to have these structures placed on you in high school you have to wake up and go to school but once you're in college you don't have the same kind of structure you think oh if my class isn't till 2 pm maybe i'll sleep in until 1 pm like i'll stay awake until 2 in the morning and not have my class until 1 pm but like really no what you're learning in high school is the kind of responsibility that you need when you leave i wish i would have had more of this attitude that i was preparing for life i was preparing for my adulthood once i graduated from high school that now now that i've graduated i'm an adult but instead i really feel that what we've conditioned children what we've conditioned adolescents and teenagers to do is to expect that basically from 18 to 25 or 26 these are still part of an extended adolescence you have different expectations on you and of course you're still expected to follow the law and not break the law and get into legal trouble and so on for most people that's not a problem that's not that's not the issue the issue is do you see yourself as an adult and if you do why are you still doing things that you did in your childhood parents from my perspective and what i saw i think a lot of parents of children who studied music who bought their children instruments these are not cheap you know compared to a soccer ball if you buy your child to violin if you buy your child a french horn you know you expect that your child is going to continue this after high school and the way that music is presented is that this is still going to be meaningful in your life after you graduate maybe you can still be in a band after high school maybe you can still go to a community orchestra and participate and perform but really a huge percentage of students who study an orchestra or are part of choir in high school don't continue after this and i followed this trend i did orchestra for one year in college and i decided i don't have time for this i'm not able to practice enough in order to perform well at the concerts so i decided i'm not going to continue this and i didn't get into a campus choir or anything like that and really i have not studied music i've barely picked up multiple instruments since i graduated from high school by contrast i definitely continue playing video games you know you really like have to think about your use of your time i didn't have the kind of hard-nosed parents that were saying like never play video games and i think that continued after i graduated that i still thought that it's okay to have these childish pleasures this enjoyment of the simple things in life because you can't always be productive you can't always be thinking about what you're doing with your life you can't always be worrying and consumed like this is just going to take over all of your thoughts all of your feelings this worry about your future you should spend your time doing some other things to take your mind off it right but how much of your time are you going to devote to taking your mind off of the things that you really should be spending your time on and when does it go from mindless entertainment taking your mind off of the difficult problems in your life to being just 100 procrastination to being a bad habit to being something that is a detriment to what you're pursuing in your life and it takes your mind off the problems in your life and then it becomes the main problem in your life yeah that's right yeah so what i wanted to say in this video is the role of music in my life from an early age was that this is a positive part of my life and this is always going to be a part of who i am when i was a child when i was an adolescent and teenager i thought of myself as a musician i thought this is who i am this is my natural talent some people are naturally gifted at drawing some people are naturally gifted toward more mechanical work i didn't think of it in terms of this is what the child has been encouraged to pursue or i didn't think of it as this is what i've been encouraged to do and this is what i've spent my time on not only was i spending time practicing music not only was i playing the violin not only was i playing guitar not only was i singing in choir and doing all of the rehearsals all the tutoring lessons all of the additional things outside of just you know practicing in the orchestra with the other students it really took over my life completely and i wasn't doing other things with my time during those years and a lot of people i think you don't want to think about because the horrible reality is maybe that if i hadn't been spending my time playing music what else could i have done and how else could i have had some improvement in other areas of my life this is really seen as an unquestioned positive and virtuous thing to do with your time and when i was a child when i was a teenager i saw i saw quite a lot on television about how the music education in downtown detroit wasn't as good as the suburban areas and this to me seemed like such a tragedy that children didn't have access to the kind of music education that i did there was a program called save the music that was about bringing instruments and donating instruments to children who were going to schools that didn't have enough funding to fund the education programs to have the right teachers to have the right instruments to have the right facilities to allow children to have the opportunity to learn and perform on stage and to compete in competitions but this to me seemed like this is something that everybody every child needs to have access to this is something that is going to benefit them it's going to enrich their lives and improve their intelligence uh make them just more well well-rounded people this i really think we need to examine maybe it's not the case and maybe for discussing my own history and think about my own past maybe i really would have benefited from doing team sports in high school or if i instead of quitting after one week into a swim team what if i had continued with swim team maybe my physique now and maybe i would just have more of this practice with building my body with building up muscles and the kind of training and dedication that comes with team sports that comes with swim team waking up early in the morning hitting the pool getting in there into this ice cold water every morning yeah that's that that builds character that builds a kind of determination a kind of coping ability that no matter what the circumstances are in your life you're going to wake up early you're going to do some physical exercise and this is going to be the start of your morning there have been a lot of studies that show how much physical exercise is good for not only your physical health your well-being but your mental well-being as well and i don't really buy the studies that i read about learning a musical instrument i don't really believe that playing a musical instrument is going to by default make you happier i don't by default think it's going to make you smarter i've seen news headlines before about this and i remember my parents saying that this will make me more intelligent basically like if i play music if i work really hard all those hours that i was learning vivaldi all those times that i was practicing this mozart piece and it really calls into question classical music classical music is not only seen as elevating your social status it's also seen as elevating your intelligence as making you a more refined person in this way i thought that learning how to play vivaldi and learning this bach concerto would make me a more sophisticated and refined person it didn't work well that's that's what you say uh you know compared to look it depends on what standards you have for yourself what standards do you want to hold yourself to a phrase that i've heard is the bigotry of low expectations and i think that i myself was imposing pretty low standards for myself i had low expectations of what i could accomplish and what i could do with my life and i didn't grow up in the most sophisticated area of the world growing up in the detroit area the kind of person that i saw as famous that i saw as important that i saw as making changes or at least being relevant were all musicians partly because of the history of the detroit area so when i was growing up eminem was huge i mean he was massively popular but in the house we didn't really listen to eminem uh we listened to motown you know my parents were old and they listened to smokey robinson they listened to diana ross and the supremes you know like these were tops yeah that's right yeah stevie wonder a lot of different music was in the household what i saw glamorized and what i saw glorified from the historical figures from the detroit area were motown singers i thought that to make a difference in the world to be an important person it made sense to be a musician your opinion mattered if you were a musician and you were famous you were on the news all the time yeah i was unaware of the political situation in detroit i knew that it was not good but i i heard on the news that kwame kilpatrick was this horribly corrupt politician and this you know who who else did we have to take as our hero who else did we have to see and emulate their success when people praised kwame and kilpatrick they called him the hip-hop mayor the hip hop praise they could give him was saying that he was like a rock star that he was like a musician that's right that he was a politician people cared about the way they care about a rapper so that it really shows that the main icons the main people would be looked up to were musicians that's right so growing up i really thought that music was an unquestioned good i saw it as something virtuous i thought it was a good use of my time and that eventually maybe it would be a part of my adulthood maybe it would be a part of becoming an important person in the world that if i had the skills that i developed in choir that i developed in performing for an audience and singing in front of a group of 300 people in my mind i thought that maybe that would translate to other aspects of my life and i've had to come to the conclusion that it really doesn't that performing something that you practice a thousand times and perform for an audience isn't necessarily going to benefit you in life and that maybe it's so specific that learning this mozart mass is not going to be relevant in your life once you're older and i've had to reflect that all of those hours that i put into practicing music that i that i put into studying music and learning how to play an instrument might have been a waste of my time for me it was fairly easy to come to terms with the fact that playing video games was a pure waste of my time but it's been harder to come to terms with the fact that all the hours that i spent playing music and performing might have been a complete waste of my time and that i've had to question why it was that i was given all this positive reinforcement why is it that for a young girl that they're encouraged to perform in this way of just performing what they've rehearsed a thousand times this music that they've learned i've had to even come to terms with the fact that it hasn't even translated into the my ability to compose music i've never been able to really compose music or create music which you know if i were going to make it a career if i had been thinking of that i didn't learn any of the skills for actually learning how to make my own music all i learned was this rote memorization and for the most part i think that probably has not benefited me in my adult life fundamentally what does it mean for a girl to become a woman fundamentally how can we help a child transform into an adult a boy turn into a man the answer can't be memorizing music for hours and hours rehearsing the music and performing in front of a crowd a roadway in detroit has been renamed in honor of motown legend stevie wonder the singer was joined by detroit's mayor and other motown alumni for the unveiling of stevie wonder avenue the ceremony took place at the corner of milwaukee and woodward avenues stevie wonder avenue i want all of us to walk down the street that leads us to a place of humanity of equality of fairness and respect wonder moved to detroit from saginaw when he was a child and was signed by motown at the age of [Music] 11.