I feel sorry for all these children forced to take piano or violin lessons, I feel sorry for all these pushy parents, who think that kids can get plenty of benefits from music lessons! A new study done by Harvard researchers is saying it is a myth!! A lot of people are effectively under the impression that children are improving their learning capacities when they are learning music or playing an instrument, but these new studies by Samuel Mehr, a doctoral student at Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Elizabeth Spelke, a Professor of Psychology, basically demonstrate the opposite:
‘More than 80 percent of American adults think that music improves children’s grades or intelligence. Even in the scientific community, there’s a general belief that music is important for these extrinsic reasons. But there is very little evidence supporting the idea that music classes enhance children’s cognitive development,’ explained Mehr to the Harvard Gazette. So where does this idea come from?
It comes from a single study published in Nature which coined the famous term the ‘Mozart effect’ which supposedly said that subjects performed better on spatial tasks after listening to music. Since, numerous studies have demonstrated it was basically BS, but the idea has persisted in our collective imagination, even broadening the notion to ‘we are more intelligent when we listen to music’,… well, not really!
Mehr and his colleagues reviewed the literature about this idea and found only 5 studies using randomized trials, and only one was showing a positive effect, still a very small one: ‘a 2.7 point increase in IQ after a year of music lessons’, which is certainly not very significant at a statistical level.
So what did Mehr and his team do? They followed 29 parents and their 4-year-old children, tested the children and randomly assigned each of them to one of 2 classes: one with music training and one with visual arts. Both classes were taught by the same teacher (Mehr himself) to get rid of the effect of different teachers, and they tested the children on cognition, vocabulary, mathematics and special tasks:
‘Instead of using something general, like an IQ test, we tested four specific domains of cognition. If there really is an effect of music training on children’s cognition, we should be able to better detect it here than in previous studies, because these tests are more sensitive than tests of general intelligence’, continued Mehr.
And the study’s results showed no evidence for cognitive benefits of music training… to be fair the children who received the music training ‘performed slightly better at one spatial task, while those who received visual arts training performed better at the other’!
Still, Mehr wasn’t totally satisfied because the study was performed on a very small amount of people – ‘We only had 15 children in the music group, and 14 in the visual arts’ – but he replicated the study with a larger group. In his second study, 45 families were involved, and again no significant differences were found between both groups, ‘Even when we used the finest-grained statistical analyses available to us, the effects just weren’t there.’
Nevertheless, Mehr isn’t saying children shouldn’t be taught music, of course, music is a wonderful thing, but he wants to establish the truth and kill the myth, as he explained:
‘There’s a compelling case to be made for teaching music that has nothing to do with extrinsic benefits. We don’t teach kids Shakespeare because we think it will help them do better on the SATs. We do it because we believe Shakespeare is important’.
‘Music is an ancient, uniquely human activity. The oldest flutes that have been dug up are 40,000 years old, and human song long preceded that. Every single culture in the world has music, including music for children. Music says something about what it means to be human, and it would be crazy not to teach this to our children.
It makes sense, of course, and he is totally right, music should be taught, but for the right reasons, not because of the delusional idea it can make your kid smarter! Previous studies had already debunked this myth and I bet that this new one isn’t going to kill it forever, probably because it is a very seductive story, and everyone loves a fairy tale!