Education: The Importance Of The Arts In Education

I remember when I was in Elementary School and every day we had time to do music, art, and/or theater both in class and as an extra elective. I know that personally for me this was my favorite part of each day when I was able to have a bit more freedom and express myself the way I wanted to through the arts. Every day this is what my classmates and I looked forward to, every lesson we got to use the arts or every time we went to our electives we loved learning and remembered what we learned because it was done in a fun way. Everyone loved this experience, but unfortunately not every child gets to experience this fun way of learning in school anymore. The No Child Left Behind act states that the arts are mandatory as a core academic subject(“11 …show more content…
To begin, music integration in education is immensely beneficial to students. Think back to when you were in elementary school and you were working on an activity and your teacher would turn on music in the background; it probably relaxed you and helped to motivate you and bring new ideas and thoughts to your work. That is how music is, according to Nancy Reif and Leslie Grant (2010) “music can relax, excite, and motivate students in many ways.” Music programs are constantly being cut from schools due to the budgets despite the fact that they are proven to improve academics in students. And, new brain studies prove that music improves skills in math and reading, as well as creativity, social development, personality adjustment, and self-worth (“11 facts,” 2014). Another study found that students in elementary school who participated in music integrated into daily curriculum showed more improved cognitive development such as enhanced spatial and temporal reasoning, improved mathematic reasoning, constantly increase in positive self-concept and confidence, improved literacy and performance on the SAT exam, and enhanced English fluency for non-native speakers which connects back with the unified classroom of students with different backgrounds (Appel, M. 2006). One of the most important things that music does for students cognitively is that it will retain in their memory, everyone has had an earworm (the word for when a song gets stuck in your head). Well, teaching with music will stick in students heads because rhythm and rhyme often stay in our minds and can be easily remembered when needed and songs and chants will find their way into long-term memory and allow for an easily accessed mnemonic structure to help you to remember procedural steps, processes and cycles, elements of a structure, as well as spelling (Reif and Grant 2010). So, music has many benefits of its own when integrated into