Why Sports Should Lose School Funding Before Music

When I was a kid, I took music lessons. Piano from the age of 5 until 15, and trombone lessons from age 11 until I graduated high school. My parents always made it clear to me that my continued music education was not, in any way shape or form, optional.

As a child, I felt that this was highly unfair. However, as an adult, I couldn't be more grateful that they made me stick with it. The background I had in music from an early age has given me the opportunity to become a professional musician now, but as my folks explain it, that's not why they did it.

Music education, my mother has always said, is about so much more than learning to play an instrument. Becoming a musician not only teaches vital skills of discipline, it stretches the brain in unimaginable ways. It improves skills in math and science and helps us learn how to learn. After you've mastered the art of playing an instrument, everything becomes easy. Her and my father's choice to keep my sister and me in music wasn't about making us into musicians, it was about giving us opportunities we couldn't get in any other way.

My education has served me well. It's been the chief reason I've managed to be successful in spite of my struggle with child and adult ADHD. Knowing as many musicians as I do, I have seen how true it is that people who are musicians are all-around capable people - in addition to being well-rounded emotionally and generally cooperative and good.

It's hard to argue that good quality music education doesn't have the potential to have a profoundly positive effect on the students who get it and on society at large. Yet across the country, music programs, it seems, are always the first to feel the pinch as educational funding is reduced and cut.

Meanwhile, sports and athletic programs find over and over that they have little to fear.

While some may cite the obesity epidemic as good reason to support athletics and sports, I seriously question whether these programs do any real good in that area. My childhood experience with school physical education did a lot more to turn me away from physical activity than to encourage it: my school's program was more about sports and competition than teaching personal physical health and on more than one occasion, I remember being humiliated by teachers for being bad at throwing a football or for being the slowest in running the track due to my asthma.

I don't want to malign all gym teachers based on my experience, but I do think that competitive sports get undue emphasis and support in public school. Certainly, I think it's absurd to give them a higher place than music.

Not that I think sports don't have a valuable place in the lives of kids and in a community, but in terms of sheer educational value, is it really right to say they're better? Can we even say they're better in terms of usefulness or popularity? Sports are popular, sure, but not everyone likes them, whereas it's hard to find a person who doesn't love music. A child who's serious about athletics is also a great deal less likely to make a career out of it than a child interested in music.

I think it's time to return sports to their proper place in our communities: recreation. Enjoyable pastimes outside of school, to be enjoyed together by people of all ages as a way to strengthen the bonds between community members.