The National Association for Music Education (MENC), along with the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), and the US Department of Education explain just how important music education can be for even the youngest children...
Nobody denies the long-term benefits of early education. But then we ask ourselves "How can a newborn baby benefit from a Kindermusik class?"
Research and common sense emphasize the importance and benefits of making music an essential part of the earliest education of young children:
1) We know that music is among the first and most important modes of communication experienced by infants.
Even though the youngest children do not yet “speak”, they understand the fundamental values of emotion created by music.
2) As young children grow and develop, music continues as a basic medium not only of communication, but of self-expression as well.
Among other things, music expands memory and vocabulary, has a great effect on reasoning skills, and strengthens logical and perceptual ideas.
3) As preschool children not only listen to and respond to music, but also learn to make music by singing and playing instruments together, they create important contexts for the early learning of vital life skills such as cooperation, collaboration, and group effort.
4) Guided music experiences also begin to teach young children to make judgments about what constitutes “good” music, thereby developing in them the rudiments of an aesthetic sense.
5) Music contributes strongly to “school readiness”…They are preparing skills that will apply to language, to literacy, and to life itself.
- excerpted from a report issued by the Early Childhood Music Summit, June 2000. Read the article in its entirety here.
