As a musician and music educator I do not find this meta-analysis' results surprising - or concerning - in the least https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1288497220602466304

Training in music doesn't transfer to cognitive skills? ....and? We already know those "brain training" games don't do what they *explicitly set out* to do, so how would this?

(And I have known plenty of people with high levels of academic achievement who have experienced lifelong frustration at their inability to reach similar levels of achievement in music. This thing goes both ways, folks)

Much more productive, I think, to question why it is that music educators have been so thoroughly pushed to rely on this kind of argument to justify their discipline

The cultural & political context is key here

Look, we have already greatly reduced and even cut SCIENCE and SOCIAL STUDIES from elementary schools because they are not on standardized tests.

We *already* have an impoverished, scarcity model view of curricula

And it's amazing how little reflection we have about the purposes of schooling when we invest so much money and precious human time in it

Arguments against music education are regularly held to a different standard than other subjects.

Explain to me (actually, don't) why we have math up to AP Calculus or whatever in high school when the majority of people will never use much beyond fairly basic arithmetic

The practical societal argument is b/c a small % of those students will go on to STEM fields & they need to practice those skills early if they're going to develop them later

This is, of course, how music works - but w/o the same financial clout in (how we perceive) the economy

So just maybe, the argument for music is that there's something democratizing in giving human beings the chance to experiment with a wide range of expressive arts **regardless of their career path** and **without reducing them to their test scores**

The fact that this may not be a winning argument in today's cultural context is further proof that our educational system is in crisis - not a crisis of achievement, but one of MEANING

And that's bigger than music educators can solve (although we're caught in it). It's related to the ongoing "crisis in the humanities" and everything else - a narrow vision that's really symptom of neoliberalism & capitalism working in tandem

What we do know is this - when Americans had the kind of economy we seem to want to get back to - that post-war boom that still echoes in our imaginations - what they demanded for their children wasn't more education-for-job-training-alone. Maybe we should listen to that

...I could say more, but I need to get ready to teach a string of private lessons for students whose test scores I do not know & could not care less about

(Almost 800 lessons taught so far this year, folks)

My guess is though that people will get unnecessarily emotional about this study in the same way as when they find out learning styles aren't real