"Food for the Gods"

From THE ECONOMIST, June 1-7, 1996

Bad news for Philistines everywhere. Just as governments on both sides of the Atlantic are advocating core educational curricula that emphasize reading writing and 'rithmetic, two studies, - one carried out in America and the other in Switzerland and Austria - suggest that training in music and the visual arts is no mere frippery, but may help the assimilation of more "serious" subjects.

The American study, the work of Martin Gardiner, of the Music School in Providence, Rhode Island, and a group of his colleagues, looked at five- to seven-year-olds in the state. Four classes, in two schools, were enrolled in a special program that emphasized the systematic development of musical and artistic skills. They did this in addition to the standard curriculum. Two other, less fortunate, classes - acting as controls - merely suffered from normal lessons.

After seven months, all 96 pupils involved in the experiment were tested. At this point Dr. Gardiner discovered that his experimental group had, according to their kindergarten records, been underachievers, rather than being the random sample a statistician might have preferred. Nevertheless, the tests showed that they had caught up with their less artistic peers in reading, and were outperforming them in mathematics - an outperformance that lasted until the study ended that following year.

The Alpine experiment, in a sense, picked up from there. Its subjects were older children - from seven to 15 - and there were more of them (around 1,200). But it came to similar conclusions. Maria Spychiger, then at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, and Jean-Luc Patry, from Salzburg University in Austria, again had twice as many subjects as they did controls. Seventy classes of children had the number of music lessons they took increased from one or two to five a week - an increase that was made at the expense of teaching mathematics and languages. Thirty-five classes continued on the old syllabus.

After three years, and despite the reduction in the amount of teaching they had received in the subject, the "musicians" were as good as the controls at math, and better at languages. They were also more cooperative with each other. Music truly has charms to sooth the savage breast.

  - copyright THE ECONOMIST, June 1-7, 1996