Music for music's sake

Last night, I couldn't sleep, and so my mind thought about many different subjects last night. My thoughts went back to a girl I was talking to during the Orff class who just had finished an interview. She said that the interview went quite well, except for the last part. There were three people in the interview. A teacher, an involved parent, and the principal. The principal decided to ask about a scenario that was basically along the lines of what do you do with a student with bad math scores that doesn't want to do music. The girl gave her answer and the principal didn't like that answer and told her what she thought her answer should have been. Do you know what that answer was? You tell the student that if they do music your math scores will improve.

*Trueblat steps up on soapbox*

Come again?!? I find so many things wrong with this statement I don't know where to start. My first reaction being, so basically, you're telling me and the student that music is only important because it improves you're math skills. Gee, that's the reason I went through four years of college, practicing 3 hours a day, and learning everything I can about teaching music, so I can improve a kid's math scores?

Sorry, music is it's own subject, and should be treated as such. It should receive an equal amount of time as other subjects. To me, it's just as important to learn music as it is math and science. Teaching music for the sole purpose of supposedly improving scores in other areas is degrading to music and beyond that, is a farce. The correlation may be there, but there are other factors that are involved in that.

Sometimes I get sick of the way music has to be defended, providing all these petty little excuses about why we need to have music in our schools. We shouldn't need to use them. Do we provide reasons anymore about why we do math or science in our schools? No. We do them for math's or science's sake, not some lame petty excuse. Music should be the same way.

*steps off soapbox*