Role of Music and Dance in Education
Humans love music and dance. We find music and dance across all cultures. Kids also love music and dance. Even kids 2 years of age love to dance on music. Thus we should use music and dance more in education.
The English alphabet song helps kids to learn English alphabets easily. Most Hindi speakers do not remember Hindi alphabets. The reason is that Hindi alphabets are not taught as a rhyming song.
I learnt Japanese counting by watching YouTube. I watched a normal video with number names and I could not remember them. Then I watched a video with a Japanese number song. It really helped to remember the number names. In fact it even motivated my son who was 6 years of age at that time to learn Japanese counting till 20. The song was till 20. Even my 3 year daughter was able to learn Japanese counting till 10. In fact I was able to use YouTube music videos to teach them Spanish counting also. I personally have learnt a little bit of Chinese and French counting also by seeing YouTube based number songs.
Music and dance have been their with us for thousands of years. In fact they are integral to our existence. Howard Gardner tells in his Theory of Multiple Intelligences that humans have a separate intelligences for music and bodily-kinesthetic activities. According to him humans have multiple intelligences and not a single intelligence. Thus all humans have ability to appreciate music and dance. So have more of these 2 intelligences and some have less.
We find use of music in junior grades. Kids learn lot of nursery rhymes. We also find things like number songs and alphabet songs. Interestingly as we move up the school we find less and less use of music. Dance is used even less than music.
Later on I tried to learn Japanese formally. The YouTube based number song had made me feel that Japanese is easy. I found it a little difficult to remember Hiragana character shapes until I made a dance out of character shapes. That really helped me. Although since I was not using Japanese in my day to day life in India I slowly forgot most of the characters. Still the only character shapes I do remember are due to the dances I created out of each character shapes. Had I been using even a little bit of Japanese in day to day life I would have remembered all the character shapes for long term.
The interesting thing is that even though theory and practice tell us about the power of music and dance the education system does not use it much. Except for number and alphabet songs we find very few uses of music and dance to teach to curriculum. I was able to find some stuff on YouTube but it was way too less.
My 3 year old daughter was able to learn names of planets by seeing songs on Solar system. I also found song for remembering the periodic table but we need more such stuff if we want kids to learn in a fun way.
I was able to use Ricky Martin’s song — Uno, Dos, Tres, Maria to get me kids learn 1,2,3 in Spanish. After these 3 numbers I used Spanish number song for teaching them Spanish counting. Their is a famous Bollywood song 1,2,3… in Hindi. I used it to get my 3 year old daughter learn Hindi counting. Songs are very powerful for teaching. That has been my experience.
Governments should spend more in this direction. YouTube is now accessible to vast number of people around the world. Even in a developing country like India we now have 4G network in large part of the country. A decent song takes less than USD 1,000 to develop in a country like India. Thus for USD 1 million a thousand concepts can be propagated in form of songs. This USD 1 million can help train many millions of kids.
By comparison for USD 1 million you cannot teach more than a few thousand students in a country like India. In a country like USA you cannot teach even a thousand students for USD 1 million.
Many people fight protect their language. Many people feel that immigrants do not speak the native language of the country. Instead of fighting they should create songs to teach their languages! Most immigrants and their kids will learn native languages if they are easy to learn.
I have founded an open education project called Fun2Do Labs. To know more about it visit : http://fun2dolabs.org . Subscribe to me on Medium to read my posts on education and technology.
