Philosophy
Music Together starts with the premise that all children are musical, and that they can achieve basic music competence provided their music environment is sufficiently rich. All class activities are based on Developmentally Appropriate Practice, an approach to learning that takes into account how children really learn at different developmental stages in their lives. Because very young children learn primarily through play, the program provides a fun, relaxed environment with a nonformal teaching approach.
Some critics of this and other early childhood music programs have questioned whether an organized class is necessary to teach children a basic life skill such as singing. However, children can no longer reliably learn music skills from their surrounding environment, as they could several generations ago, due to a steady decrease in live music-making activities available to them. A study done by Levinowitz showed that fewer than 50% of first-graders could sing in tune.
Music learning is in many ways analogous to language learning; just as the child seems to teach himself language through interacting with a language environment, he teaches himself music through being in a music environment. When adults model active singing and movement behaviors, the child imitates and learns. The combination of classroom activities and at-home music-making inspired by a recording and songbook help children learn music skills naturally and effortlessly.
Read more about this topic: Music Together
Famous quotes containing the word philosophy:
“A philosophy can and must be worked out with the greatest rigour and discipline in the details, but can ultimately be founded on nothing but faith: and this is the reason, I suspect, why the novelties in philosophy are only in elaboration, and never in fundamentals.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“And truly Philosophy is but sophisticated poetry. Whence do those ancient writers derive all their authority but from the poets?”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“Methinks it would be some advantage to philosophy if men were named merely in the gross, as they are known. It would be necessary only to know the genus and perhaps the race or variety, to know the individual. We are not prepared to believe that every private soldier in a Roman army had a name of his own,—because we have not supposed that he had a character of his own.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)