The Huffington Post – Welz Kauffman
“Take note: Thomas Edison played the piano; Albert Einstein studied piano and violin; PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi played in an all-girl rock band in high school; and Steve Jobs riffed Bob Dylan songs on the guitar. Seventy-five percent of Silicon Valley CEOs learned a musical instrument when young. And in the book Everything We Needed to Know about Business, We Learned Playing Music, 32 CEOs and business leaders say their career success reflected key parallels of musicianship and business, including confidence, self-esteem, teamwork, innovation and taking risks. In the past two years, city and Chicago Public School leadership have made strides toward richer arts education in our city’s schools. And following a robust Music in our Schools Month, there are questions we must ask. Do our school children truly benefit from this legacy? Do they grasp this city’s musical — and overall arts — heritage? Do they — all of them — get the chance to develop their own creative and expressive skills through exploring and performing music? More importantly, are we cultivating Chicago’s future creative thinkers and leaders? Kids’ creativity, as measured by the most recent Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking scores, has been sliding since 1990, most noticeably among our younger students. Reduced music and arts education is cited as a key factor. Meanwhile, more and more research underscores the transformative power of music education and the arts in enhancing children’s cognitive skills. According to Americans for the Arts, students with four years of music or arts in high school, on average, score 100 points higher on the verbal and math portions of the SAT than those with just one-half year of music or other arts.”(more)