education

My little sister informed me this week that there is no longer music, art, or physical education classes at her school. This absolutely frustrates and baffles me. With the economic "crisis" and budget cuts, I cannot believe how much is being taken from education. What hope do we have for our already declining future if we cut education?

The process of learning an instrument has been proven to be directly linked with the neural connections used in abstract reasoning and spatial relations. A 1997 study demonstrated that musical training was more beneficial than computer training when it comes to spatial-temporal ability, which develops "higher brain functions required for mathematics, chess, science and engineering." (And yet we are installing computers and taking out band.) The brain has been described as a giant "connect the dot" game and it has been argued that both visual art and music may make more dot-connections than even math or language. These connections allow for higher order thinking, including creativity, problem-solving, and reasoning skills. The more complex the connections, the more complex the thinking. Heaven have mercy on a society who is resigned to rote thinking, memorization, and blind repetition of facts.

Other than the obvious physical and health benefits of exercise, there also has been research on the positive correlation between exercise and intelligence. The aforementioned study "revealed that aerobic exercise resulted in a moderately large effect on overall cognitive performance", especially in the area of executive function. The researchers define executive functions as "planning and selecting strategies that organize goal-directed actions (Das et al. 1994) and stand apart from processes involved in basic information processing" (bold mine). Our society has literally whittled school down to "basic information processing" and that makes me a little nervous.