The Press Saturday, June 19, 1926. Music in Schools.

Press, Volume LXII, Issue 18722, 19 June 1926, Page 14

The Press Saturday, June 19, 1926. Music in Schools.

If the efforts of the new Director of Education to give school-children more and better music, or to get it from them, are anywhere opposed, the baseless fabric of the opposition will almost certainly be found to consist in a notion that art is an' unnecessary "extra" in education and in life. This notion may express itself in the argument that time devoted to music must be time stolen from other and more important subjects, which will therefore suffer; or it may express itself in another and cruder form, but to the same ultimate effect, in the argument that children go to school to equip themselves for a trade or profession, and in the triumphant table-banging question: How,will a smattering of music help this boy to sell motor-cars or that to set a broken leg? It is, of course, true that children attend school to equip themselves for making a living, or, more exactly, to make it easier for them, when they come to study a trade or profession, to acquire its technique; but it is much truer to say that they attend school to equip themselves for life. Both the objections stated above, the one more subtly, the other more obviously and more vulgarly, spring from regarding education as a kind of financial investment. Investment in reading, writing, and arithmetic is good, for it produces an adequate return in. material welfare of one sort or another. Investment in a course of professional training is better still, for it produces a really handsome return, the index of which may be anything from a motor-car to a knighthood. But investment in the arts is the poorest of all: is, indeed, no investment, but unprofitable expenditure, the purchase of something which cannot be entered on any kind of balance-sheet among realisable assets. Such, in coarse summary, is this not uncommon view, of education, one which is really dictated. by a corresponding view of life. And yet life is a bigger thing than the means of supporting life, in whatever affluence; living is more important than a living, however prosperous. Nor is education a series of careful investments: it is, ■ rather, a process, single yet complex, in the development of the full man. No doubt it is right, and not only right but, essential, that the schools should provide such matter-of-fact instruction, of all kinds, as will help the growing human animal to move about in the world, to -find and occupy his place in.it; but. this is an incidental rather than a sole function. Education has long belied its name by concerning itself almost exclusively with the material environment of life, for which it .has attempted to prepare children intellectually and physically; but the emotional side of human nature and its spiritual totality have been almost everywhere ignored. It is a significant and astonishing fact that English literature is a comparatively new sub-, ject in schools; that it has only during the last twenty years begun to assume in the education of English children the important place it deserves. Yet it might have been thought that, of all the instruments which art offers for the ennobling of emotion but of intellect, English literature at least would have been welcomed, seized, and made effective long before the twentieth century. But the truth is. that the teaching of English literature is even now only beginning to be what it should be. The explanation of this backwardness lies parity in such materialistic conceptions of education as were touched on earlier, partly.; in the fact that to instruct is much easier than to communicate the breath and spirit of art. Many teachers, therefore, have been content, or have forced themselves, to restrict their work to what can be cut and dried,- like grammar and mathematics, forgetting or trying to forget that men are not to be educated piecemeal.. Reform has come; but it has come in New Zealand very slowly.' A few years ago the, new Headmaster of Wanganui Collegiate School caused some surprise by attacking the New Zealand system of physical and intellectual education. To him, he sajd, it mattered more that a boy should feel rightly than that he should think rightly. It is noteworthy that the clearest public statement we have had of the need for emotional education should have come from a J newly-arrived Englishman; But though Mr Pierce spoke so recently almost as a pioneer, the cause which he pleaded is to-day, if not victorious, in a 1 position to achieve victory. The appointment of a Director of Music in the schools of New Zealand means a good deal more than that, the Department thinks our children have hitherto sung badly and ought to sing a little better. It means, unless there is more stupidity in educational circles than is pleasant to think of, that music will cease to be a perfunctory "extra," or a species of musical drill, or a device to exer is the lungs. It means that the. lamentable j taste too often shown in the choice i of songs for school-children will be | superseded by the taste of a musician, lit means, or ought to mean, that art has won its place in the education !and therefore in the life of New Zealand. As a people we have been reproached with our want of musical culture: those who are now going grey may live to see the new generation lift from us that reproach. ' " We have said much which to some may seem remote from the subject of music in schools; but, as Captain Bunsby remarked, "The bearings of "these observations lays in the appli"cation on 'em." The development of school music is to be welcomed for.Hs own sake; for music, one i of those glories, indefinable in a sentence, which

set man only a little lower than the angels, is the most universal of the arts, and the one to which children most naturally respond. It is to be welcomed, too, as a sort of.artistic centre. Music, "to the condition p£ which all "other arts aspire," awakens sympathy with each of them. But it deserves a double welcome for the reason we have tried to emphasise throughout this article—because it is far more than a "subject", good in itself; because, if our hopes are answered, ■ it will complete the unity of education. Music is not merely an added quantum, one more layer of bricks on a wall. It is more like the third note of Abt Vogler's three, from which he fashioned " not a fourth sound, but a star." This accounts for Mr Tayler's saying that he has never known a school, where the devotion of more time to music reduced the efficiency of other work. A last word may be added. Obviously the good results which it is fair to expect from music and from a new adjustment of educational forces will not come quickly, and they will certainly not come as an automatic consequence of Mr Tayler's appointment. He has to fight depraved and commonplace taste; he has to organise and educate his educators.. For to use art as an educational instrument, if it does not " need heaven-sent moments for " this skill," does demand more than gpod intentions. There is no reason why the good intentions of the teaching profession should not be translated into active perfo'rmance; but the translation will exact all their energy and all their loyalty. | I