Please publish this as an open letter to Education Minister Andrew Holness.

Dear Sir:

It is with a sense of relief that I greet the promise of your ministry to focus on early childhood and primary education. I do hope one of the changes will be that of enforcing the music curriculum, although there are some teachers who do not know that such a curriculum exists.

The findings of several researches indicate children who are exposed to a programme of study in the arts, especially music, glean great benefits from same.

"In a study of the ability of 14-year-old science students in 17 countries, the top three countries were Hungary, the Netherlands, and Japan. All three include music throughout the curriculum from kindergarten through high school. In the 1960s, the Kodaly system of music education was instituted in the schools of Hungary, as a result of the outstanding academic achievement of children in the music programme." - Music and the Mind by Dee Dickinson.

People's evolution

The ability of a people to write and read the music it performs, using a universally recognised system, speaks to a people's evolution as a nation. Thus one of the main thrusts of music education should be to enable the student to be musically literate aurally competent, performance ready, and to also possess the skills necessary for documenting the creative process.

The benefits of an education in music surpass the immediate musical skills one learns, and touches on the cognitive process in a broad-based way. The results of many researches have yielded findings proving that music in education benefits an individual on many levels. Below I will cite a few findings from researchers.

"The scores of elementary instrumental music students on standardised math tests increased with each year they participated in the instrumental program."

- Music Training Helps Underachievers, Nature, May 26, 1996.

"A 1997 study of elementary students in an arts-based program concluded that students' math test scores rose as their time in arts education classes increased."

- Arts Exposure and Class Performance, Phi Delta Kappan, October, 1998.

"College admissions officers continue to cite participation in music as an important factor in making admissions decisions. They claim that music participation demonstrates time management, creativity, expression, and open- mindedness."

- Carl Hartman, Arts May Improve Students' Grades, The Associated Press, October 1999.

"Today, the research emerging from the cognitive sciences gives us useful information to explain those connections. As a result of technology which allows us to see the human brain while it is in the process of thinking, we can observe, for example, that when people listen to melodies with a variety of pitch and timbre, the right hemisphere of the brain is activated. It also 'lights up' when people play music by ear.

When, however, people learn to read music, understand key signatures, notation and other details of scores, and are able to follow the sequence of notes, then the left hemisphere 'lights up' significantly. It is activated in the same area that is involved in analytical and mathematical thinking."

Let us then, as a nation, be proactive in redeeming our education system, harnessing all the means available to us. "It can be done. It must be done."

I am, etc.,

KERRON MORGAN

kerron_lee@yahoo.com

deCarteret College

Mandeville

Manchester