Mostly I wholeheartedly agree. But music at least requires skill and some mental acuity and discipline. It was among the Ancient Greek arts that were foundational to a good education.
“But music at least requires skill and some mental acuity and discipline.”
The problem with universities is they “industrialize” degrees. What happens when there’s a demand in the culture for, say, fifteen hundred pots each year but you build a plant to manufacture fifteen thousand pots each year? There’s a heck of a lot of “unemployed” pots. That’s the problem with subsidizing a degree for anything. That’s what in industry is called a “push” system. A normal economy would create a natural “pull” system and only produce enough pots for what is needed.
There’s only so much demand for, say, pharmacists. Yet the local college is pumping out hundreds of pharmacists each year who then have to go get a degree in something needed, like nursing. So instead of getting the promised hundred plus thousand per year they spend even more money and start at forty thousand dollars per year.
The whole university system is built as a push system when it should reflect the actual need of society and act as a pull system.
I graduated from SDSU in 1978 with a degree in Music and a plan to get a certificate in Music Therapy. I mainly wanted to work with the mentally retarded because my brother was retarded. Once I got into the program, however, I found out jobs were fleeting and could be cut suddenly depending on budgets and the whim of hospital administrators so I ended up dropping out after the first semester. Music therapy has been proven to be very therapeutic for the mentally retarded and the elderly and it’s sad that it’s one of the first casualties whenever budget woes arise.
I agree with you. Music is part of a civilized society. Except rap.
But in Classical Greece music was considered to be deeply connected to a mathematics education. Try that today and you would have few music graduates.