With school underway, I asked my eight-year-old son this week if he had any interest in learning guitar. He said he’d prefer the piano. I was pleased, but hesi-tant. I had my own stint with after-school piano lessons at age eight — plinking out notes from classical pieces that were for-eign to me. My progress was agonizingly slow and I gave up within months.

Music education hasn’t changed funda-mentally since the 1970s. Students are still taught to read notation so they can recite compositions that they would never lis-ten to on their MP3 players or play with friends. The four “streams” in music educa-tion — orchestra, chorus, marching band and jazz band — have remained constant for four decades, while a third generation is growing up listening to rock and pop music. And my experience as an eight-year-old is all too common. Many children quit before making progress with an in-strument, then regret it as adults. Others play violin or trumpet for the school or-chestra or band, then drop the instrument after graduating from high school.

This is a loss for all. Playing music enriches life. That’s why so many adults wish that they could play an instrument, particularly guitar or piano, which are ideally suited for playing with others. The question is: Why do schools teach music in a way that turns off so many young people rather than ig-niting their imagination? Adolescents and teenagers are crazy about popular music. At a time when educators are desperate to engage students and improve school cultures, can we do a better job of harness-ing the power of music to get kids excited about school?

The experience of an organization called Little Kids Rock suggests the answer is a resounding yes — provided we change the way mu-sic is taught. Little Kids Rock has helped revitalize music programs in over a thousand public schools and served 150,000 children, most of them from low-income families. The organization has distributed 30,000 free instruments, primarily guitars, and trained 1,500 teachers to run music classes in which stu-dents quickly experience the joys of playing their favorite songs, per-forming in bands, and composing their own music. Along the way, the organization is working to in-stitute a fifth stream in American music education: popular music — or what it calls “contemporary band.”

“Students t ru ly exper ience just about immediate success in Little Kids Rock,” explained

Beyond Baby Mozart, Students Who RockBy: David Bornstein | September 8, 2011

Melanie Faulkner, supervisor of elementary music for Hillsbor-ough County Public Schools, in Tampa, Fla., where 14,000 stu-dents in 83 schools are served by the program. “The children feel like they’re right there making real music. And the success spills over into other areas of school.”

The key to Little Kids Rock is that it teaches children to play music the way many musicians learn to play it — not by notation, but by listening, imitation and meaning-ful experimentation. “The knowl-edge you need to get started play-ing rock music is very limited,” explains Dave Wish, the found-er of Little Kids Rock. “In high school, my friend Paul taught me a couple of chords and, boom, my life was changed forever.”

“Making music is as much a physi-cal act as it is a cognitive act,” he

Photo courtesy of Brian Gellerstein

adds. “We don’t begin with theory when we want to teach a child to play tee-ball. We just bring the kid up to the tee, give them a bat, and let them swing.”

On the first day of class, Little Kids Rock teachers place guitars in the hands of their students and get them practicing chords that will enable them to play thousands of songs. (Many simple lessons are freely available online here.) The kids de-cide what songs they want to learn and the class is off and running. Their progress is remarkable. Within a year, eight- and nine-year-olds are playing electric guitar, bass guitar, drums and keyboards, and giving concerts, even performing their own songs. And the effect is predictable: the children can’t get enough of it.

Before launching Little Kids Rock in 2002, Wish spent 10 years as a first and second grade teacher in public schools in low-income communities in the San Francisco Bay Area. Many of his students had little structure or supervision out of school, and they would often get into trouble.

He decided to start an after-school guitar program. He got instruments donated and started one afternoon a week. Within a year, he was giving classes before and after school, five days a week, and still had to turn away children for lack of space. That bothered him, so he got the idea to recruit some of his musician friends to teach additional classes. “That idea failed miserably because they had no classroom management skills,” he recalled. That’s when he saw that it would work better if he focused on training experienced teachers.

Like many nonprofit organizations, Little Kids Rock’s main constraint is resources. Significantly, one problem the organization doesn’t face is draw-ing teachers. Its trainings frequently attract many more applicants than available slots. Teachers volunteer their time to attend trainings, which are often held over weekends. The trainings are popular because they provide simple and practical meth-ods to get high levels of participation from students.

Little Kids Rock bears similarity to the Suzuki method, which also stresses learning by ear (initially) over reading musical notation. Wish also draws from language acquisi-tion theory and applies it to music (as he explains in this talk). But the big distinction is that Little Kids Rock places a lot of emphasis on im-provisation and composing, which are rarely encouraged in tradition-al music education. If you wander around a public school, for example, you will find the walls adorned with paintings, drawings, poetry, essays, even math problems — all done by children. “What’s notoriously ab-sent?” asks Wish. “Where’s the music the kids created?”

“If you put a bunch of kids at a table, and give them a box of crayons and

paper, and five minutes free time, they’re going to make art,” he adds. “Teaching a few chords is just like giving a kid a musical crayon. If you give them time, they will start to compose their own songs.”

There is one barrier to overcome. Every art teacher has drawn a pic-ture, but many music instructors have never composed a song, so they may have no clue how to teach children to do it; they may not even believe their students can do it. In trainings, therefore, every teacher has to write a song, perform it, and record it for the other teachers in the room — all in 30 minutes.

There are tricks to jump start the process. You can start by making a list of pairs of words that rhyme. You can pick a song you like, write down the chords, scramble them, then play the chords in the new order, while saying words over them. It will help in making up a little melody. “What you find is that it’s actually remarkably simple,” says Wish. “You need to be given permission and a forum and a few basic tips, but most people are never given any of those.”

For improvisation, every teacher is also asked to play a Jimi Hendrix-style guitar solo, a novel experience for many. Kids think solos are very cool, and Little Kids Rock gives them shortcuts so they can learn how to play them, literally, in minutes. “I have kids who learn one scale, or even two notes, and will play solos all afternoon,” explained Allan Ad-kison, a Little Kids Rock instructor at Lola Rodriguez De Tio Acade-my of Future Technology, a middle school in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx. “When they start to express themselves and start to hear it, you see them become free.”

It’s not just the children who have this experience. Wish recalled that

Photo courtesy of Brian Gellerstein

one music teacher of 20 years start-ed to cry after performing a solo in a training program. “She’d been playing music most of her life but never thought she had the ability to improvise,” he recalled. “I’ve heard that from a lot of people. I think the biggest thing that teachers leave the training with is the notion that they themselves have great untapped res-ervoirs of musical potential.”

We do a disservice to children when we force them in school to learn jazz or classical music because we think it’s good for them. Too often, rather than creating an entry point for a life of music appreciation, this approach tends to weed out those who don’t make an immediate connection with the music, or don’t have parents who force them to stick it out.

Getting children excited by teach-ing them to play the music they love doesn’t mean they’ll be stuck listen-

ing to three chord songs their whole lives. “When I taught kids to read Dr. Seuss books,” says Wish, “I didn’t go home and say, ‘Oh man, when they grow up, they’re only going to want to read rhyming books.’”

If children make a durable connec-tion with music, it’s more likely that over time, their musical tastes will evolve. “I don’t listen to the same music I listened to in high school,” adds Wish. “But some of my non-musician friends do.”

One of the biggest advantages that music offers is the ability to inspire students who are otherwise bored or demoralized by school. “I’ve had students start coming back to school because of this program,” said Ad-kison. Elaine Thomas, who heads up music for the Dallas Indepen-dent School District, where Little Kids Rock serves 9,000 students in 89 schools, added: “One of the best

things is that the teachers discover a new side of their students. They see kids become successful who weren’t before.”

And the connection the kids make seems to last. Erik Herndon, a Lit-tle Kids Rock instructor at the Jean Childs Young Middle School in At-lanta, told me: “I’m just starting to see kids go on to college and a lot of them are sticking with it. One kid said to me, ‘I keep playing my gui-tar, but now when I listen to music I hear all the parts of it.’ That’s the whole idea: to promote that life long love of the music, rather than feeling that we killed it out of them.”

David Bornstein is the author of “How to Change the World,” which has been published in 20 languages, and “The Price of a Dream: The Story of the Grameen Bank,” and is co-author of “Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know.” He is the founder of dowser.org, a media site that reports on social innovation.

On Friday, I wrote about an organization called Little Kids Rock, which has helped to revitalize and broaden music education in more than a thousand schools by en-couraging children to learn to play popular music, form bands and compose their own songs. The column sparked a little bit of a culture war: some readers were aggrieved by the idea that children should learn pop-ular music in schools, others suggested that classical composers would love rock ‘n roll. Some feared that teaching pop would “dumb down” music education, others felt it was vital to make music education more relevant to children. I’d like to clarify some misconceptions and explain why I think the program is a valuable addition, rather than a threat to the classical tradition.

Little Kids Rock has had remarkable suc-cess getting students excited about music class by putting instruments (mostly gui-tars) into their hands on day one, show-ing them simple techniques to get started playing quickly, and allowing them to play music that they love to listen to. What’s most instructive about the program is how its pedagogical approach helps students enjoy early success and makes them eager to learn more — and this could be easily adapted to many musical genres that have historically spread through informal chan-nels — everything from Irish ballads to bluegrass to Brazilian samba. The teachers and school administrators I spoke with said that when children discover that they can make music with their friends — and this can begin within weeks — it gener-ates tremendous excitement and causes children to focus, experiment, practice and challenge themselves in ways that often surprise and thrill adults.

It’s important to note that the vast majority of the program’s teachers — and its biggest supporters — are themselves classically trained mu-sic instructors, who also frequently teach orchestra, chorus or jazz or marching bands. A few of them wrote in to share their experiences with Little Kids Rock. MamfeMan (20) wrote that the program had “shaped the culture of my school, the mind-set of these students, and has been — without a doubt — the most inspirational part of my life.” Another teacher, who is based in Philadelphia and teaches fifth graders, (56) added that when “students who want to learn a cer-tain song … go ahead and learn the chords, and practice till they ‘get it’’’ the belief in learning-through-practice carries over to other areas of school.

Little Kids Rock’s founder, Dave Wish, a former elementary school

Rock Is Not The EnemyBy: David Bornstein | September 13 , 2011

teacher and self-taught musician, designed his approach to mir-ror the way children acquire lan-guage. Nobody starts to speak by studying the alphabet; children begin by imitating sounds to com-municate their wants (“mama!” or “ball!”). Parents don’t correct the grammar of their toddlers; they respond with delight and lots of encouragement. With no anxiety about making mistakes, children babble freely and continuously. They get immediate and positive feedback and they absorb lan-guage like sponges.

By contrast, with music, children are often asked to learn to read and write notation, and to grasp things like time signature and note values at the very same time they’re struggling to learn the fin-gering of an instrument. It’s a lot to take in. “When you teach mu-sic through reading, the learner

Photo courtesy of Brian Gellerstein

becomes a code breaker and the teacher can become a code enforc-er,” notes Wish. That’s a different relationship than a performer and, say, a band leader. And the code the children are struggling to break may yield a song they don’t even like. Ap-proaching music education this way can take years to produce a satisfy-ing payoff for the child. And, indeed, many children lose patience; they quit music lessons, then as adults regret the decision. Only the most dedicated, disciplined or talented stick with it (or the ones with par-ents who make them).

A number of readers wrote in to share their own cautionary experi-ences. Indierhythm, from Palo Alto, Calif. (14), wrote: “I had piano les-sons at a young age and a really lame music program in elementary school and was completely turned off from music when I was a kid.” Contrarian, from the Southeast (6), added: “With the best of intentions, we absolutely ruined [our son’s] love of music by sending him to piano lessons.” And John Sieger, from

Milwaukee (37.), who teaches gui-tar to kids and adults, added: “No one needs to learn ‘Little Brown Jug’ or ‘Aura Lee.’ The minute you show someone how to play something they like, they start having fun. Mu-sic without fun is punishment. Do I like Taylor Swift? Not much. But the 15-year-old girl I showed those fairly unimaginative songs to can now play ‘Michelle’ by the Beatles. Is ‘Michelle’ classical music? To me it is.”

A number of readers would strongly disagree. Many were upset by the idea that schools should teach any-thing but serious music — like classi-cal music or jazz. (It’s worth remem-bering that people raged against the introduction of school jazz bands 40 years ago, too.) Diekunstder, from Menlo Park, Calif. (25), comment-ed: “[T]here is no classical music in-dustry shoving its values down the public’s throat, rather, it is popular music which pervades every corner of contemporary ‘culture.’” And Fed Up (44), worried: “Is this the death knell for classical music and opera? Methinks so. Sad!”

Some readers were also annoyed by my assertion that schools should not “force” classical music on children. This was not intended to disparage the classics, or music teachers, but to make the point that an appreciation of music can’t be imposed; it needs to be elicited. Tom Chapman (9) dis-agreed with the idea that we should accommodate children’s tastes. “The solution to give kids access to music they would want to listen to is, in an education sense, quite ridiculous,” he wrote. “Most popular music that students listen to is redundant and simplistic.”

The comments revealed a number of misunderstandings. First, Little Kids Rock does not seek to replace traditional music education, but to supplement it — to add a fifth stream, “contemporary band” — and it is helping schools in low-in-come communities create or expand music programs at a time of severe cutbacks in music and other arts programs.

Second, while it is valuable to give children exposures to music that they are unlikely to hear outside school, requiring them to study a particular genre of music in a par-ticular way can backfire as many readers noted. Hal Horvath, from Austin (55), observed: “One needn’t pit, as some comments do, classi-cal against popular music … Let kids start on the kind of music they enjoy, at that time in their lives. I did, and now I listen to almost ev-ery form… The only possible error, repeated often, is to force a style of music onto a child for which they have no pleasure.” Many musicians and educators (like Benjamin Zan-der — watch his fun Ted talk here) apply considerable creativity to help people cultivate an appreciation of classical music. When a child quits

Photo courtesy of Howard Dratch

piano because he hates to practice scales, no one benefits.

On the other hand, when someone gains basic proficiency on an instru-ment, it opens up musical doors very quickly. I taught myself to play guitar in my twenties and I found that it caused me to watch musicians’ fin-gers with more wonder and to listen more carefully to the way music is constructed. Little Kids Rock teach-ers say that when children have basic comfort with one instrument, they are more confident and eager to try out others. As a teacher named Scott, from Los Angeles (59), noted: “I love classical music, play classical guitar, and teach it to my students (over 100 a year), yet still see the immense value in rock music, improvisation, and composition … Rock music turned me onto classical music, not the other way around.”

But the debate over which musical genre to teach, and how to teach it, gets to a more profound question: What is music education for? A number of readers suggested that the goal is to produce professional musi-cians. As Tom Chapman (9) noted:

“Any professional musician will tell you that to get where they are (jazz, classical, or pop), they had to work hard, very hard. A classroom music setting in band, orchestra, or choir, reveals the work required to suc-ceed.”

The assumption that music educa-tion should prepare children for a musical career sets music apart from other subjects in school. We don’t teach kids math so they will become mathematicians. We teach kids math so they will be able to use math in whatever they need it for. We teach math and reading as life skills, not professional skills. If we think of music as a professional skill, then it’s fortuitous that many kids quit young. That’s part of the winnowing process, which helps us identify the ones who have the talent to attend Julliard. But if we think of the abil-ity to play music as a skill that can enrich anyone’s life, then what we see now is more like a hemorrhage of musical potential.

As in all fields of education, there is no one approach that works best. “We serve our students best when we

try to reach them in as many ways as possible to ensure that we get through to them,” says Wish. “Mu-sic is so much a part of what makes us human. It is our goal that every child grow up with the ability to ex-press themselves musically. Creat-ing a hierarchy of musical genres is counter-productive to this goal.” Wish noted that during the Septem-ber 11th memorial, citizens took solace from many different forms of music — from The Beatles to Mahler’s “Resurrection.” He added: “All were comforted, nourished and consoled by the music that spoke to them personally.”

Most students aren’t going to be-come professional musicians. For the majority, Wish says, the goal should be to “captivate their inter-est, provide them with the skills to become active music-makers, and capitalize on the joyful, engross-ing, community-building qualities that music can bring to students in school.”

David Bornstein is the author of “How to Change the World,” which has been published in 20 languages, and “The Price of a Dream: The Story of the Grameen Bank,” and is co-author of “Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know.” He is the founder of dowser.org, a media site that reports on social innovation.