During the recession of the early 1990s, schools had their funding from government funding amputated and a musical education became a sign of a middle-class upbringing. During this latest period of financial austerity, the arts have once again been summarily dismissed as superfluous in straitened times. Conductor of the Bedforshire Youth Orchestra, Michael Rose, says music services in his area, Central Bedfordshire, are set to have budgets and teaching staff cut to zero.
More broadly, the arts are facing annihilation at the hands of a government that can only comprehend social goods in narrowly economic terms. The professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College, A C Grayling, has urged the arts and humanities to “put up a fight” against these cuts, or else face destruction. But the coalition seems hell-bent on reducing policy formulation to a cost/benefit analysis, with the axe it has taken to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) being a case in point. Rick Rylance, chief executive of the AHRC, said that we need to stop viewing the arts as simply costs to society. Rylance told the Times:
On the cuts issue, it seems to me that the mind shift we have to go through is to stop thinking about these things (funding higher education) as costs and start thinking about them as investments, because we are not going to get growth and a healthier society unless we invest in these things.
How are the arts of value to society? Several studies by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) have explored the effects of art and music education on young children’s learning. These studies showed that music instruction can help build intellectual and emotional skills, facilitate children’s learning and strengthen numeracy and literacy skills.
A forthcoming study produced by the neuroscientist Professor Nina Kraus concluded that schools that fail to give music a central role in their curriculum are making a mistake. Music “fundamentally shapes” brains, and can help combat the learning difficulties associated with dyslexia and autism.
The report concluded that that “long-term musical practice strengthens cognitive functions and that these functions benefit auditory skills. Musical training bolsters higher-level mechanisms that, when impaired, relate to language and literacy deficits. Thus, musical training may serve to lessen the impact of these deficits by strengthening the corticofugal system for hearing.”
Not only does music aid brain development, but it also instils discipline. Many people complain that children today have short attention spans. Learning a musical instrument helps them to learn to concentrate over long periods of time. Playing in orchestras encourages team work, which is deemed by most employers to be an essential quality. Learning a musical instrument gives children a sense of achievement. Acquired self-worth could have knock-on effects in other aspects of a child’s life.
The government must re-evaluate the value that it places on the arts, for we are at grave risk of losing them. Sir Thomas Carlyle’s critique of utilitarian man seems particularly apt:
Mechanism smothers him worse than any Nightmare did; till the Soul is nigh choked out of him, and only a kind of Digestive, Mechanic life remains. In Earth and in Heaven he can see nothing but Mechanism; has fear for nothing else, hope in nothing else: the world would indeed grind him to pieces; but cannot he fathom the Doctrine of Motives, and cunningly compute these, and mechanize them to grind the other way?
“In Earth and in Heaven he can see nothing but Mechanism…” Britain is at risk of becoming a society that only values that which can be crudely accumulated. Must this be an inevitable consequence of the financial crisis?
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