You hear so many times that music makes children smarter and have a lower percentage rate of doing drugs. Well, my question to America is, why are we cutting music programs from schools??

Think about it, you are depriving a child of learning a life skill, you are giving them more reasons to drink, do drugs, and other destuctive things. Young people need structure in their lifes. Music provides such structure. I propose that we increase funding for musical education. Many people can not afford to own or rent a musical intrument.

If music helps America's youth, why are we taking it away from them. If we could fund a trillion dollar war, why can't we put an instrument in thousands of childs hands?

VOTE:
John '28

wow...... Jonny you are making sense!

is it a full moon or something?!

Crack that is all i can say, crack.

It would be wonderful to spend more money on musical education. I am 30 something and just learning to play the guitar, I think that it is a wonderful thing to have that ability, to love music and to be able to play. Small problem, where does the money to pay for it come from. You see the problem is not that we do not spend enough money on education, the problem is that the money we spend goes to feed a bureaucracy and not help the children.

For every dollar given to the Department of Education, only 32 cents makes it to the classroom. That means that 68 cents is spent on the bureaucracy, paying salaries of people who do not teach. Now I understand that some money will never make it into the classroom, building have to be bought and maintained, guidelines created, etc, however, when more than 2/3 of the money is not making it to the children, you have a severe problem. We can double our spending on education in a single sweep, all we would have to do is to eliminate the Department of Education, cut out the bureaucracy and spend the money on educating.

dmk

As president I plan to fix this problem. I mean think about this, Bush is putting BILLIONS of dollars into a war, I wouldn't even call it a war anymore.( I'm wondering if it's in the trillions yet.) If we took just half of what Bush put into this silly thing, MILLIONS of children could be making music. Let's put our money to good use.

With a more "socalized" education system we would not have this bureaucratical waste and the money could go straight to the kids. It works elsewhere in the world (you know, the places where their kids know English grammer better than ours).

I'm afraid I'm biased on this issue, having grown up in a musical household (my mother taught band and music for 28 years now, and now teaches music education at a university in New York). Music education and the arts in general are, I think, just as important as the "three r's". I think the undervaluing of music is indicative of a greater problem with how we tackle education in general; we seemed to have prioritized a preconceived notion of a successful and educated individual, usually killing original talent and creativity in the process.

As for sgt's quip, I'm going to have to pretty much agree with hev's objection. But, in general it isn't so much a problem of funding but emphasis and necessary institutions. As an example, public schools in the United States use to have (very generally speaking) better music education systems than private. However, "No Child Left Behind" put the emphasis on conforming the child to expected parameters ("the three r's") and standardized testing and off of the arts and developing creative talent. Now, minus maybe Catholic schools and other parochial schools, private schools have better music education programs. Again, this is mostly an emphasis issue; and even private schools can do much better. It's hard to fund a music program when a vast majority of your extracurricular funds go to sports.

America could fund musical education, little by little a year if it needs to go that slow, just keeping music alive in schools would be my main goal. We could afford it, we would just need to buy enough instruments to rent them out to students. (only if they could not afford them). Depriving a child music education is just as bad as taking away any education.

Well, to paraphrase Mr. Holland's Opus:

Take away the arts and kids will have nothing to read or write about.