The Asia Times talks about the value of classical music in forming a strong and supple mind:<\/p>\n
Any activity that requires discipline and deferred gratification benefits children, but classical music does more than sports or crafts. Playing tennis at a high level requires great concentration, but nothing like the concentration required to perform the major repertoire of classical music. Perhaps the only pursuit with comparable benefits is the study of classical languages. It is not just concentration as such, but its content that makes classical music such a formative tool. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\nI’m not one of those people who dings on “rap” music strictly for its own sake – but there’s a great point here.<\/p>\n
Classical music ties a lot of highfalutin’ concepts – meter, melody, harmony, counterpoint – together simultaneously. Not only does playing it require a lot of concentration, years of practice and long-delayed gratification, but listening to it takes time and effort to really appreciate – which was why colleges used to teach “music appreciation”. For people who don’t grow up around classical music (and I didn’t, although I played cello from ages 10 to 22, and can still crank out a tune, so I like to think I’m a fairly literate listener) some of those concepts are not things that jump out and grab you by the hypothalamus. It takes time, practice…education<\/em> to really get it.<\/p>\nAs contrast, I present hip-hop. No, this is not the standard-issue social conservative attack on the form; indeed, I used to be <\/em>a rap DJ. There is a skill to taking a rhythm apart; there is a certain art to the wordplay that a really, really good <\/em>rapper brings to the table. But hip-hop is about rhythm, which is the most immediately obvious aspect of music; even babies can perceive and completely enjoy rhythm and simple melody.<\/p>\nAnd there was a time when the goal was to master things that babies couldn’t <\/em>do.
\nJay writes:<\/p>\nThe problem is that the concepts of \u201cdiscipline\u201d and \u201cdelayed gratification\u201d are practically foreign to Americans these days. We\u2019ve become a nation that has begun to systematically rout out the qualities that make us strong. Instead of allowing children to explore, we coddle them. Instead of teaching the classics, we teach drivel. We teach \u201cself esteem\u201d instead of formal logic. A classical education trained young minds to think critically, appreciate culture, and inculcated them with the values necessary for life in a democratic society. Now, thanks to the relentless dumbing-down of society, that sort of education has been cast out as being \u201cpatriarchal,\u201d \u201cethnocentric\u201d and even just plain \u201cracist.\u201d It is any irony that the Chinese seem to have a finer appreciation for our culture than we do.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Yes, it is.<\/p>\n
There’s a parallel, of course.<\/p>\n
Like classical music, conservatism is not <\/em>intuitive to most people. Toddlers have a hard time with Hayek and Mahler, but can fully wrap their minds around “make people happy” and banging on pots. To embrace conservatism – the conservatism of Hayek and Buckley and Goldwater moreso than most of your single-issue varieties – takes some of the same attributes.<\/p>\nAnyone can figure out the First Amendment.\u00a0 The Tenth Amendment?\u00a0 That’s complicated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the things that makes a conservative a conservative is opposition to the relentless dumbing-down of our culture. Authoritarians need a dumb, compliant population, focused purely on their own material wants and needs – people who value punctual trains over liberty – to succeed. Our education system has been failing for at least a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,10,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-war","category-education","category-pc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3858"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3858\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}