Having Music Education in our schools is a must for every
community. Where would we be without music in our lives. I
can not even imagine a life without music. Music assists us in
expressing our inner feelings and emotions when words fail us.
Music encapsulates the meaning of great truths of mankind and helps us
commnuicate those truths in a way that enables us to easily recall
those truths. We need music in our lives. We all listen to
music on the radio and on our music devices each day. We sing in
the shower when we don't feel comfortable with singing in public.
We must pass on music to our children. We need a society that can
create music and record it for future generations. 
Also research is finding that studying music
causes the brains of our children in the early years to develop larger
and more quickly. Additionally, research is finding that students who
study music have higher academic scores than students who do not have
the opportunity to study music. Statistics are beginning to point
this fact out. The web site "Marchenia's World of music Education"
has the following information:
"Dr. Gordon Shaw found
the “Mozart Effect in 1993, which found that college students IQ tests
increased by nine points after listening to particular music of the
famous classical composer Mozart. Shaw thought that spatial and
abstract reasoning skills would be positively affected by the music,
increasing IQ scores (Burack, 2005). DeMorest and Morrison make clear
that a control group increased their scores as well by listening to
silence. However, the score increase was not as high as the Mozart
group. I agree with the assertion that we cannot attribute the Mozart
Effect as a cause of the improved scores, only a correlation (2000).
Still, this idea is important because music education not only involves
musical and instrument instruction, but listening, appreciating, and
learning about various forms of music."
The included chart illustrates the above point.
These stats come from Marchenia's site: As you can see, students
in 1999 who had been involved in the arts scored much higher on their
SAT than those who did not. Research is continuing to show us
that studying music and all of the arts benefits students. The
earlier this begins, the more our children will benefit. From the New York Academy of Sciences web site we have the following
information:
MRI scanning in living human subjects can be used to measure
gross anatomy and to locate centers of brain activity by following
changes in blood flow. Using MRI to look at anatomy, Patrick Bermudez
and Robert Zatorre find more grey matter in the auditory cortex of the
right hemisphere in musicians compared to nonmusicians. Peter Schneider
and colleagues report that structural and activity differences in
Heschl's gyrus can be linked to differences in pitch perception and
musical instrument preference. The differences are probably not
genetic, but due to use and practice. Experience at a young age
probably causes expansion and contraction of the amount of cortical
territory devoted to processing musical and other kinds of information.
It is a popular belief that music lessons can be beneficial to
cognition, especially when started at a young age. Gottfried Schlaug
and colleagues explain,
Music training might
enhance spatial reasoning because music notation itself is spatial.
Mathematical skills may well be enhanced by music learning because
understanding rhythmic notation actually requires math-specific skills
such as pattern recognition and an understanding of proportion, ratio,
fractions, and subdivision ... Phonemic awareness skills may be
improved by music training because both music and language processing
require the ability to segment streams of sound into small perceptual
units. The primary benefits of musical training are probably most
apparent in skills closely associated with music. Donald Hodges and
Jonathan Burdette have found that conductors are better at pitch
discrimination and temporal order judgments than age-matched
non-musically-trained controls. Schlaug and colleagues report that fine
motor and melodic discrimination are enhanced by 14 months of musical
training in young children. However, they did not yet find significant
longitudinal evidence that musical training significantly enhances
broader aspects of cognitive development after 14 months, although
studies over longer time scales are currently underway.
So, as you can see, I am passionate about our need for music educaiton
in the schools. Our children need this opportunity to expand
their minds and worlds. We must provide these experiences for
them. For more detailed reading, open this link which is a pdf file of a research paper I wrote. Brainresearchpaper