Without knowing it, people engage with symphonic music on a regular basis. Think about it. Hollywood and the gaming industry extensively use symphonic music in their movies and games. The symphonic music uniquely enables emotion to imbue images with feeling and verbal dialogue with context. If you were to turn off the symphonic music, the images and dialogue within movies and games would come across as cold and incomplete. This is because the viewer would lack the emotional experience that comes from the music. Yet few make the connection between the benefits to society from movies and games and the benefits from music programs in U.S. Education.
That is why music teachers are constantly battling an underlying public perception that music programs are not important. Right now many of those music teachers are experiencing a lack of support and feel that the arts are going to lose funding and priority in education. They feel alone when making the case for their program’s relevance to students, parents, administrators and politicians. This article is written to help music teachers and give them hope about the future of music programs, as well as empower them with a new paradigm that is a breakthrough advocacy for why music programs are now essential in U.S. Education. (Click here for resources of extensive research that has already been done on the impact of music programs)
The core message of this new advocacy is that art and music are the strongest catalysts for creativity and the ability to be creative will be the future foundation for a successful society. Let’s first talk about art and music. Both are exactly the same vehicle but in different form; art is frozen music and music is liquid art. But what is now only being recognized is that the creative act of expressing art and music in turn stimulates more creativity. It is a powerful self-reinforcing loop. But the fluidity and impact of music makes it more powerful than art. And within music, the violin family of string instruments are unique in that they stimulate creativity the strongest. This is due to the strings being amplified by an instrument whose original design was developed through divine geometry centuries ago. The very movement of a bow along the strings induces vibrations that resonate in consonance with the quantum frequencies that comprise all of matter. Our minds sense this vibrational consonance in our bodies to further stimulate creativity.
The reason the powerful advantage of music to stimulate creativity is being outlined here is because in the near future the era of human labor will be ending and the era of human creativity will begin. That is why music teachers should have hope. Society will recognize the relevance and need for music programs! But we are not to that stage yet. First technology of quantum computing, artificial intelligence and big data will be integrated within cloud-based apps. These apps will create new business ecosystems by replacing human labor in engineering, medicine, finance, science and dozens of other fields. These new ecosystems will quickly scale throughout the world, especially now with the accelerated push into remote work and distance learning. The end result will be exponentially more disruptive than the industrial revolution. We can see evidence of this already happening. (Click here for more in-depth information on the future with technology apps) In this new era, a consensus will begin to develop how the unique human potential for creativity will be the only advantage over technology, no matter how powerful technology becomes. At that point, the hard skills learned through standard education will become useless without the human also having the ability to stimulate creativity. That means, for humans to be relevant in the future, they will have to bring something new and creative to their work and learning every single day. Within this type of thinking there will be nearly unlimited potential for self-growth, which has been labeled by Psychology as a ‘growth mindset’. This creative growth mindset is what will define human professional and personal success in the future. The humans that cannot be creative will eventually become unemployable and obsolete. (Click here for more in-depth information on the future requirement for creativity)
Therefore in this new era, the current education process will also become obsolete because it is based on grading students on how well they regurgitate memorized information. This process does nothing to stimulate the uniqueness of the human mind and instead just teaches students counter-productive skills to compete with the advancing technology. Educators are already seeing students being undermined by an outdated curriculum happening today. Albert Einstein understood this almost 100 years ago when he noted: “A society’s competitive advantage will come not from how well its schools teach the multiplication and periodic tables, but from how well they stimulate imagination and creativity.” (Click here for more in-depth information on the uniqueness of the human mind)
When this new era begins, U.S. Education will be caught off guard and will scramble to adapt. Educators and administrators will have no immediate solutions for how to transition an entire education system that will suddenly become irrelevant. Many educators already know that such a transition would lead to some form of Project Based Learning curriculum. But there still will be a lot of experimenting with different variations of this curriculum until a process is developed that can scale through all of U.S. Education. During this turbulent transition it will be the music programs, and especially the strings programs, that will be the relevant and essential anchors within U.S. Education. These programs will continue to foster the ability for students to be able to think creatively and sustain their potential for success. (Click here for an in-depth information on the future breakthrough scalable education system)
Soon it will be understood that playing an instrument will be a required cognitive workout in order to be successful in business and science. Just like it is currently understood that lifting weights is a required physical workout in order to be successful in sports and athletics. However, the future understanding of this bold new paradigm needs to begin now because the future of our music programs and students depends on it.
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