Should
a child be made to practice? As with everything, views differ.
Some
parents see music education as an opportunity for kids to learn discipline and
time management in addition to the music itself. Others hold that learning music shouldn’t involve any pressure,
either because it contradicts the spirit of the activity or because they just
don’t have the time or energy to enforce one more thing. Some parents’ goal is to have
their children stay in lessons until they become a proficient musician. Others are content to expose their
offspring to music and see what comes of it.
Which
approach is best?
In
my experience, both approaches can be effective, depending upon the child. Both can also fail miserably,
depending upon the child. However, I
believe a child has a better chance of learning to play and eventually enjoying
the instrument if some sort of practice routine is introduced.
Because…
• Although a child may stop lessons
after a couple of years, it’s a shame if they never progress during that time. Even a brief stint in lessons
should show them they are capable of learning music. If they want to come back to it later on, they should remember it as something at
which they were successful. Also,
they’ll have two years—or six months, or whatever length of time they studied—of
skills on which to build.
• Self-expression usually comes
later. We sometimes make the
mistake of believing beginning music lessons are a vehicle of artistic
expression. Occasionally they may be, but more often they are putting in place
the building blocks for later
artistry. We don’t teach a
first-grader how to add and expect him to immediately be able to find a
polynomial. We teach him to add
with the understanding that it is the first of many steps that will lead to
solving complex equations. In
other words, the good stuff takes a few years; learning music is a gift that
sits under the tree for a while.
• Lessons cost money and parents
should get their money’s worth.
When a teacher has to go over the same material week after week, a
parent gets less value for their music education dollar.
• When a student practices, they
progress. When they progress, they
learn new pieces, finish books, and
understand more of what they see on the page. Accomplishment feels good. This is sometimes what well-meaning parents miss when
they don’t push practicing because they want to keep music “fun.” It’s not fun to do something
poorly. It is fun to be able to play
a piece that impresses your friends.
All
that said, I have heard accounts of students who for years rarely touched their instrument
outside of lessons and yet enjoyed the lessons so much their parents let them
continue, until one day the student took it upon themselves to start practicing
and then never stopped. (In fact, we have a teacher with that
story.) And sometimes a child gets enough out of the weekly lesson time itself to
make continuing worthwhile.
The lessons may still be enriching even if they don’t result in a high
degree of proficiency; in some cases, gaining expertise isn’t necessarily the
goal.
But
I believe most parents put their child in lessons with the hope and expectation
that they’ll learn to play. And
rarely does a child stop music lessons because they just couldn’t abide their
20-minute-a-day practice regimen.
Mostly they stop because they so seldom sit down to practice that
they’re not learning to play, and so it gradually becomes less important to
both them and their parents. And, the
vast majority of our advanced students throughout the years have had a practice
routine dictated to them, at least at the beginning.
Practicing
for lessons can give children insight into how to tackle something big by
breaking it into smaller steps. It
familiarizes them with the emotional trajectory of facing something new: the initial uncertainty, perhaps some
frustration, then focus, persistence, work, understanding, more work, and
finally, mastery. This may
end up being at least as great a
gift as the music itself.
