Ongoing History Daily: The importance of music education
Music education is more than about learning to play an instrument, understanding music theory, and learning to read music. It also helps with critical thinking, mathematical abilities, and eye-hand coordination. This has been known for centuries.
The ancient Greeks thought that music education was as important as philosophy when it came to developing young minds and the moral character of young people. They believed that the “art of sounds,” as they sometimes called it, needed to be part of anyone’s overall life discipline. Plato and Pythagoras suggested that music and philosophy coordinated things within the human soul, which, in turn, led to universal harmony.
The one hitch? Some, like Aristotle, thought that music created purely for the pleasure of an audience was bad. Why? Because that undermined what he saw as the essence of music. We can probably guess what he’d think about today’s pop music.