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
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.
Music is far and away the more worthy subject.
…music teaches you to be a good person; financial literacy teaches you to be a tool…
No. Only CPAs are valuable because only having a high salary matters.
More note worthy even…
I’ll see myself out.
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.
For you, maybe.
Playing music is still my number one coping skill for stress, and still my number one activity that raises my self esteem.
I have done nothing with my music knowledge except enjoy it for myself. I played this recorder here, then clarinet, then bass clarinet, and finally today I only play bass guitar.
Still love it, and am grateful to have discovered I enjoyed playing when I was ten years old from school band. My band teacher was awesome. She encouraged me at a time no other adult did.
Edit, in middle school we learned the theme song from Jurassic Park. It was the first time I got shivers when we’d play it together on stage. What an incredible feeling. And now, some 25 years later, that theme song still rotates in my brain music playlist. I still remember that feeling on stage the night we performed it on stage in concert. Absolutely incredible.
School should not be for finding hobbies. It’s bad enough children are denied agency, but to waste time on hobbies that aren’t even relevant to them?
I literally just said it was relevant to me. Im not gonna argue with someone who sees music as a waste of time. Band was an elective. Accounting was also an elective (in high school). I took both.
How would you know what career/life/goal you want to pursue if you don’t try it first at school? Is the purpose of school to teach you how to be an automaton working a dead end job? Cause that’s what it sounds like you want
Also describing music purely as a “hobby” is asinine
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.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I don’t know of any 1st grade classes teaching financial literacy, nor high school classes focusing on how to play a recorder.
I did have a few weeks that focus on domestic finances in 8th grade. That almost nobody paid attention to. So there’s at least one school that did both 20 years ago…
Facebook tier meme
This is stupid.
In school they had us practice recorder in ghe 4th grade, ages 9/10. I took accounting in highschool, ages 16/17.
We did both. Not only did we do both, these two lessons were taught at very different stages of education.
Came here to say this, we also learned recorder in 4th grade. If you tried teaching 4th graders about trading securities derivatives you’d have a riot on your hands in less than 5 minutes lol.
trading securities derivatives
The fuck would you ever teach them that for?
They’re 10 years old not idiots, they can learn through age appropriate skills such as budgeting and decision making - which can be made into a fun game as can almost anything you want to teach.
Exactly. I also had the thought, if you breakdown music composition, it’s basically math. Music is math.
And numerous studies showing the growth in other subjects when music is (actually) taught in elementary. It is crossing the streams, so to speak.
It is also what makes us human, not robots.
I once saw a study where they did a brain scan on someone while playing music. The results were fascinating. I’m bout to double check it’s been so long, but I’m near certain it lights up all parts of the brain. Something amazing happens when we play music. It absolutely is a core human experience.
Techno is accounting
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.
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.
I’m pretty sure this is a song lyric from “the poor”, by Jesse Welles.
“I was memorizing capitols
I was in the spelling bee
I must’ve missed the part
Where they taught the art of private equity
I was selling chocolate bars
I had a disorder
I was cuttin’ up a frog
Got lost in the fog
Learnin’ how to play a recorder
“
I don’t think it’s supposed to be a slam against musical instruments.
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.
There is a cross section of smart people who only learned how to do school work and got straight As but failed to understand how that school work applies to real life.
I’ve been in classes with people who were in AP calculus have real difficulty in shop class trying to figure out how much square footage of whatever you needed. These are people who can figure out the area under a curve but fail to calculate a 20% tip.
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.
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.
Now they don’t do either.
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.
The recorder is not what was stopping them from teaching your finance.
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!
