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If you’re wondering, Why recorders? — there are three reasons:
- They’re portable.
- Recorders in decent enough quality can be cheaply produced, so even low-income children get to play one. Compare that with a guitar where 30$ gets you a piece of wood that detunes as soon as you lay eyes on it. Not great for practicing.
- Recorders have an easily memorizable fingering scheme that allows you to quickly pick up the C Major scale. Compare this with a guitar where you need to remember for each string individually which frets have the notes of the scale.
You don’t need to remember for each string individually which frets have the notes of the scale on a guitar. If you know where the base note is, there is exactly one pattern for minor and one for major.
Guitars are very hard to play for kids because the strings are so thin that they hurt after very few minutes.
Guitars are very hard to play for kids because the strings are so thin that they hurt after very few minutes.
That’s a better reason.
Also, longer fingers help with play and children don’t have full sized hands yet.
That said, you could probably get away with ukeleles instead of recorders, if you were really insistent on string instruments.
Indeed. The scheme for guitar could literally not be easier.
fingering scheme
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Wait until you hear about the g string
It was a gateway instrument into learning the clarinet then eventually the alto sax, then baritone sax for me, so I really appreciate it.
That being said, financial literacy is super important. Wasn’t home-ec supposed to teach us that??
You make these good points, but all I’m hearing is that Big Recorder is paying out public schools to keep making children buy and play them. Hot Cross Buns? More like Huge Con Bunkos! Thank you for your attention to this matter!!!
Answers in Progress did a video on that subject: https://youtu.be/zyZY1dq5BFc
Music is far and away the more worthy subject.
No. Only CPAs are valuable because only having a high salary matters.
I’ve had co-workers refuse a pay rise because they thought they would lose money due to higher taxes.
Music as a lesson has never once been beneficial outside of a classroom.
One skill is useful for life, the other is useful for the 3 people who intend to go on to study music.
You must be some kind of troll. Music literally transforms the structure of your brain, strengthens neural connections, and makes you smarter in every way. If you knew anything about either music or mathematics, you would know the two are fundamentally linked. There are many problems with our society, but too much access to arts and culture definitely is not one of them. Do they even teach music in schools anymore? States have been cutting the curricula to the bone, and the arts have suffered the most.
This is a right wing meme
how
there’s a reason that the acronym is STEAM now. the arts are just as important as science, tech, engineering and maths (both for society and culture at large, but more specifically it’s been shown that music helps people with learning other academic concepts). the right sees the only value in society as that which produces direct economic value. it’s a right wing meme because it paints the arts as a waste of time, and economic management as important
Got it. Thanks for the explanation!
A few things to unpack here. Firstly, the most right wing people I know are PhD candidates in philosophy. They are huge proponents of the arts. They would argue that the anti-arts sentiment in the Republican Party today comes from their embrace of the working class and is not a traditional conservative value.
Secondly, the reason many of us disregard the STEAM acronym is because it’s meaningless. Arts encompasses all of the subjects outside of STEM so STEAM just means “all subjects” which is not something you can focus on by definition.
the most right wing people I know are PhD candidates in philosophy. They are huge proponents of the arts. They would argue that the anti-arts sentiment in the Republican Party today comes from their embrace of the working class and is not a traditional conservative value.
i think that this comes down to terminology and communication… generally in the world today, “right wing” encompasses social and economic conservatism. when i say right wing (as an aussie), im talking about both the republican party, and the australian Liberal/national coalition (bearing in mind that the capital L liberal in their name means economic liberalism - aka libertarian)
i agree with a lot of right wing values, BUT im much more left, because whilst i think that economy and currency are important to produce left wing (for everyone) values, it fails to account for negative externalities (which includes both social, and economic economic externalities… and honestly social negative externalities lead to economic externalities)
“right wing” today in general communication, imo, means something different to what right wing meant during the french revolution
Arts encompasses all of the subjects outside of STEM so STEAM just means “all subjects” which is not something you can focus on by definition.
it doesn’t though… business (including both accounting and management), hospitality, trades, law, marketing, psych, teaching… i hesitate to include nursing but not medicine, but there’s a grey area there… and i didn’t even start to list trades and things in australia that aren’t “university” but covered by “TAFE”
STEAM is almost… secondary value: by default (except tech and eng perhaps?) they don’t produce value, but are important precursors that feed INTO the other things. you have to value the precursors, else the other “value makers” don’t have a foundation
Labor are also right wing, they literally introduced neoliberalism to our shores.
It’s anti art and culture.
Also, financial literacy applies to capitalist systems, by glorifying it, they are glorifying capitalism
Recognizing and surviving within the system you are in a skill everyone needs, it is not glorifying anything.
Home economics was an excellent class that exposed students to many creative and practical applications that were often ultimately built around budgeting.
Too bad they don’t really offer that anymore
Because they don’t like being recorded?
Nah apparently recorders are a Nazi plot or something so this is based & wokepilled.
The goal of schools is not to prepare you for capitalism. Luckily, they’re one of the few institutions that are still concerned with human values beyond money.
You could argue it would be valuable, from a practical sense, to additionally offer classes on personal finance, sure, but it’s abhorrent to use music lessons as a mocking point or suggest that somehow the school should teach finance instead of all other subject matters.
People will be complaining about percentages and fractions being taught instead of teaching how to do taxes or do a budget. Which leads to the conclusion that people are idiots and it doesn’t matter what you teach them. Other people are not idiots and they use the skills they learnt doing exercises and homework for good stuff but also sometimes for taxes and budgeting.
Which leads to the conclusion that people are idiots and it doesn’t matter what you teach them.
There’s a joke, once you get to college, that freshman year is about unlearning all the crap you were taught in high school.
This isn’t an issue of “stupid people” nearly so much as it is deliberately manipulated and propagandized people.
What they’re taught matters immensely. And one of the more insidious lessons of the Western education system is that schools exist to Stack Rank students, in order to segregate the Smarties from the Dummies and sort the deserving from the undeserving.
I was a bit rude here, true. And I don’t love all the testing and grading. A lot of teaching up to around seventh or eighth grade is putting material in front of kids until it clicks.
But anyway, still a bunch of people will whine that they didn’t learn this very unenjoyable, very specific thing in school while chastising schools for not being enjoyable enough. And chastising schools for teaching things that are the very basis of being able to figure out this very unenjoyable, very specific thing.
For what it’s worth, as someone who graduated highschool in Utah (one of the shittest US states in terms of funding and education) I learned the recorder in Elementary school and was required to take a financial literacy class in highschool to graduate. True, that class taught now-useless skills like how to write a check, but it also taught me about 401Ks/Roth IRAs, how to file taxes, managing credit scores and lines of credit, mortgages and debt, budgeting, and a bunch of other skills besides. I’m not sure how standard this is across the US, but I can’t imagine it’s too uncommon given that it was a shitty small town high school in a deep red state. Hell, I’ve seen memes like this posted by people who graduated in my year and it always perplexes me because I know for a fact they had to take that class.
The number of times I have to explain to people here in California that are my age that they did in fact take financial literacy, or that they were in fact taught skills like what to do during pregnancy is unfortunately too high. Tons of people like to talk about what schools need without realizing that it has it and they just didn’t pay attention.
Tons of people like to talk about what schools need without realizing that it has it and they just didn’t pay attention.
A semester class that happened thirty years ago probably doesn’t stick out in your memory beside the 20 years of Facebook memes pounding your brain like a mini gun.
A lot of people just repeat things uncritically because they’ve been listening to the crap on the radio or the Joe Rogan podcast or whatever for so long that it’s drowned the native memories out.
Totally agreed. I have often thought the same thing when people claim that schools need to teach critical thinking skills. Mine did.
At my shitty red state high school financial literacy was a “life skill class” and only meant for those not looking to attend college.
Wild. That seems incredibly stupid, but incredibly stupid is very on-brand for the US education system lmao.
I’ll take that to mean my experience was very much not standard, then.
I had math, history, science, and English class with Spanish or French (one foreign language). None of those taught me anything as useful as your class.
My guy, they’re 6 to 8. It’s not time to learn that mess
Yeah kids aren’t going to engage with something like that if they’ve never seen a bill in their lives, or even had their own money to spend. Music is universal, and 6 to 8 is exactly the age when they can start developing talent.
And what that would amount to would be another math class. Like, it was a few classes in like 8th grade math between algebra lessons.
What’s wrong with teaching music in school? I never got on with it, but some of my classmates genuinely loved it. And now that we’re adults they aren’t professional musicians by any stretch of the imagination, but they still enjoy playing just for the fun of it or as a hobby.
Few people I know do financial literacy as a hobby, no judgement though if that’s what helps you unwind after a day at the office.
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They did teach us financial literacy.
If you found it important as a reasonably intelligent adult you could teach yourself basic financial literacy in an afternoon.
I agree. A lot of people don’t know where to start, though. And there is a lot of bad information out there.
The recorder is not what was stopping them from teaching your finance.
Teaching finance is important, but being exposed to arts or different subjects like trade can be beneficial. A well rounded education to maybe spark an interest. Just think we had a whole world of accountants.
Yeah let’s teach 4th graders that read at a 2nd grade level and struggle with multiplication economics, this seems rationale
At the same time we’re teaching them the value of coins, we should be teaching them simple budgeting. Only need addition and subtraction for that.
Gee sounds like they’re the sort of people desperately in need of these lessons.
But hey lets teach 4th graders that read at a 2nd grade level and struggle with multiplication how to blow into a piece of plastic that’s going to end up in landfill in 12 months time.
I remember how in 6th grade my (i assume) well meaning teacher decided to have a theme week where we were to pair up, boy and girl and pretend to be a couple and figure out budgeting, finding rent prices for apartments and what kinds of jobs we could have.
That was the week I unlocked existential anxiety that never went away lol. Didn’t help that every adult in my life told me to not worry about it and that it would take many years before budgeting like an adult would be relevant for me.
There also weren’t any further classes about this type of stuff so I just walked around from age 12 and onward panicking about how I would fail at life because I was bad at math.
Weirdly enough I still remember that the boy I was paired up with insisted we should have a cat and that we should call it Møffe. I remember that our budget was very bad and full of holes and our teacher would come over from time to time. “What about the electric bill? What about the water and heating bill? Remember taxes.” Every time she would remind us of something we had overlooked or missed, it felt like my nervous system was being electrocuted.
Pretty hardcore to just throw this type of assignment at 12 year olds with no warning and then never speak of it again.
As an adult I am terrified of spending money on anything that isn’t food or bills. My boyfriend constantly has to remind me that we are financially safe because I feel like we could end up on the streets any moment. It’s not all a result of that one workshop, but it planted the seeds for that anxiety to grow and blossom into what it is today.
I think a budgeting workshop would be a great idea for older kids who are approaching adulthood and are more ready for it. But holy shit, don’t do that to actual children who can’t even grasp the concept of taxes and rent money yet.
Just remember, Møffe will be with you even if you have to go live in the street!
I think my partner in that workshop got Møffe when we split. He seemed more attached to him while I was too busy contemplating my existence.
Oh darn, I understand your stress better now.
“How are you going to make enough money?” The teacher asked us cause my partner wanted to live well.
“I don’t know?”
“You’ll need a very good job”
“I’ll be in poverty then?”
“Don’t you know what you want to do in life?”
I’M BARELY A TEENAGER I DON’T KNOW WHAT I WANT FOR LUNCH EVEN
“No.”
“Then live in poverty”
Like the fuck was wrong with our teachers, man!
These things put me off music for years. Maybe next time start us with an instrument that doesn’t sound like total shit in beginners hands and which stinks of antiseptic.
What instrument doesn’t sound like total shit in beginner’s hands? A keyboard?
Guitar. Learn 3-4 chords and you can play half of the songs out there. Easy to begin with, hard to master.
Alternatively, Ukulele. Just 4 strings, and smaller, so more suitable for small children, though the chords seem to be more complicated.
You can pick up a recorder for 20 dollars and they will withstand abuse. Not so a guitar. I agree that it’s better musically and maybe pedagogically but it’s got some deal breakers.
it’s got some deal breakers
No doubt, and being used by a horde of kids is probably the toughest thing instruments have to ensure
I got my acoustic guitar for incredibly cheap 35,-€, so at least price can be overcome. And, reading the thread, it seems that the recorder has spoiled learning/playing an instrument for quite a few people, so one could argue that it’s a failed investment, even at a low price point.
Can’t say anything on the pedagogical side of things, I chose a job where I don’t have to meet people all the time, let alone children.
Plenty of kids are not ready to handle a guitar
How so? Age wise, motor skills, character, lacking musical education, …? WDYM?
Discipline to treat it delicately
The chords are easier; ukuleles are tuned like the 4 high strings of a guitar (yes I know that it’s actually gCEA but it’s functionally the same), and the chords are the same but without the last two strings.
However ukuleles are harder to play for adults because they are way too small. Anything higher than the 8th fret is basically unplayable.
Eh, I played both for a while (never became good, but that’s not the point), and I always found Ukulele chords awkward and confusing even on the lower frets, while Guitar came more natural to me. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was due to the lack of musical education and professional training though. Oh, and my Ukulele was tuned ADF#H…
H
Found the German, lol.
ADF#B is a full tone higher but it doesn’t change chord shapes.
I find the chords simple to grasp, but awkward to execute due to how small the neck is.
Found the German, lol.
Dammit, I tried so hard to hide it. :D
Yep! Great example.
The violin ofc.
A guitar
All education should be about creating productive citizens for the state!
Well, it’s state funded, what did you expect?
Education should inform us how to least get fucked by the state and capitalism.
You mean like teaching children the basics of musical theory and practice so they learn they can to enjoy life and create art without paying for it?
Or like how to have enough money for food, shelter, and other essentials.
Obviously it’s impossible to do both.
Obviously children have a finite amount of time to study without impacting their own agency too much.
If only education could be a lifelong endeavor instead of something to do until you’re 18.
Bet.
Let them learn music when they’re 19 if they want and focus on important shit at school.
I always found music class to be like a break between other classes. If you would’ve tried to teach me finances in the same timeslot, I would not have learned half of it.
