Your child and music
Whether to teach a child to read and write, whether to teach him algebra, chemistry, history, finally, whether to teach him to jump over the “goat” – all these issues usually do not arise in the family: they are centrally resolved by society and, one must think, irrevocably. But in the most important question for the development of a child, whether he will receive a musical education, to what extent and what quality, complete freedom of choice is left. And the decision is made by parents who are little prepared for this independently, in each case individually and, unfortunately, they often decide incorrectly. Everything depends on a measure of understanding the consequences of this decision for the whole future spiritual life of their children. Alas, in many cases the measure of understanding is low.
Of course, it happens that circumstances hinder the musical education and education of any child. But people interfere much more often, moreover, people closest to him. They interfere because of ignorance, because of prejudices, well-established errors, to put it bluntly, they interfere because of ignorance and lack of culture.
I have long been convinced that, depending on their attitude to the musical education of children, parents fall into five categories.
The first category, the most numerous, are those people who do not want to take the extra trouble and bother with musical education. A typical phrase that is pronounced like this is: “My son (daughter) has a bear in his ear”. By this is meant not deafness, but the absence of so-called “musical” hearing. And with this very notion of musical ear, one of the most stupid and difficult to eliminate prejudices is associated. In fact, there is no “musical” ear, as there is no, say, “literary” vision, on which it would depend, whether or not to teach children to read and write. Teachers speak of musical hearing when they have in mind the degree of training of the acoustic distinctive skills necessary to achieve certain levels of musical professionalism. At the same time, this is again not about whether there is a musical ear or not, but about the extent to which it is developed by upbringing and education. Therefore, to apply this concept before learning, and in relation to all children (even those who are not going to become professional musicians) is completely meaningless. All normal children have a hearing as a potential ability to perceive music and play music at the amateur level (the only exception is, perhaps, the deaf from birth). Returning to the characteristics of the first category of parents (who blame the bear), we must understand that in this case the parent is the “bear”, which steps in the ear of his own child and delays his musical (and, therefore, common) development.
The second category is parents who proceed from the belief that their child is by nature talented. And with all that, as a rule, they are uncritical about their child and are prone to monstrous exaggerations, I must say that in the main these parents are absolutely right. Their children have the ability to learn music. In all cases. (The best music educators adhere to the same conviction. It is said that the legendary Peter Stolyarsky, the teacher of David Oistrakh, happened to listen to the beginners, saying to their parents like this: “Ah, nothing special, an ordinary genius child.”)
Just as not finding a single healthy child who could not be taught to read and write, you will not find such a healthy child who could not, with proper training, master competent music playing (reading and recording notes, playing them in voice and music tool).
It may be objected that not all the children who studied in music schools mastered this tolerably. Yes it is, and there are two reasons for this. First, the beginning of training is too late (and 7–8 years is already too late!), Second, the wrong teaching methods. After all, literacy manages to teach all children, even the most negligent, and not all of them to read music (fluent reading of notes). Can you imagine what it should be for the “miracle technique” so that the child learns to read and does not learn ?! However, we will talk about the correct teaching methods in another chapter. In the meantime, I emphasize that it is for this category of parents, who intuitively know that their children are geeks, I write this series of articles. However, parents from the previous category, if they manage to “get rid of the bear”, will learn from these notes how it is better, more rational to create conditions for the musical development of their children.
The third category – parents, driven by vanity. They begin to teach children music for reasons of prestige, feelings of arrogance and other low motives (even envy). Among these people there are even those who are deeply indifferent to art, tend to speak disdainfully about music as, at best, about an empty lesson, but, nevertheless, tend to “buy” a musical education for their offspring so that it is “no worse than others” .
