today, i wish i had taken my music education more seriously when i did have the chance. and then maybe, i might have had a shot at teaching kids do-re-mi instead of teaching bored semi-adults about society (when they clearly do not care which way the world turns).
i don’t remember learning music in school. we did a bit of solfege in primary school (yet never really found out what it was or, more importantly, what it could help us do), played the recorder (which i was a poor student of. somehow, i never could play more than a single octave!), sang the teapot song (i’m a little teapot short and stout, here is my handle, here is my spout…), and generally alternated between envy (of classmates who could play the piano) and boredom.
secondary school music classes were worse. we were herded into a classroom and made to copy music theory notes off a transparency (pre-powerpoint days) while the teacher spent the entire half hour smoking outside the room. and… since i was in a chinese school and those theory notes were written entirely in chinese, most of what they meant remain shrouded in mystery till this day.
to cut a long story short… (although the story is already a tad too long…) i wish our schools took music education a little (a lot?) more seriously. i wish music lessons were not that hour of the day you looked forward to because you didn’t have to do anything.
singapore, which boasts of children who can compute numbers and play around with test-tubes more easily than many others, also has (too many) children who cannot sing in tune; who cannot clap in a steady rhythm to a song; who cannot name a single composition by beethoven. and how much time or money would it take to teach them just a fraction of these things?
becoming a professor of sociology just doesn’t seem to mean anything anymore when you think about the fact that you could teach a child of five to sing a folksong in tune – something he would actually remember for life.
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