Notable Facts & Quotes about the Arts
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The U.S. Department of Labor issued a report in 1991 urging schools to teach for the future workplace. The skills they recommend (working in teams, communication, self-esteem, creative thinking, imagination, and invention) are exactly those learned in school music and arts education programs.


March 1997 marks the third anniversary of the release of the National Standards for Arts Education, as well as the recognition of the arts, among other academic disciplines, as a core subject.


"A vibrant arts community is critical to how corporations decide where to locate, when people decide where to work."

- Megatrends and Megatrends 2000 author John Naisbit

Students with course work or experience in music performance scored 51 point higher on the verbal portion of the SAT and 39 points higher on the math portion of the SAT than students with no course work or experience in the arts.

For complete information see the Music Educators National Conference (MENC) Web site at http://www.menc.org

- Profiles of SAT and Achievement Test Takers, The College Board, compiled by the
Music Educators National Conference (MENC) 1995

Mozart's Piano Sonata K448 was found to significantly increase spatial scores of college students on IQ tests when the Sonata was listened to for 10 minutes, a phenomenon dubbed the "Mozart Effect.".

- From Nature. Copyright 1993, Frances Rauscher, Ph.D., Gordon Shaw, Ph.D.,
University of California, Irvine

Music lessons have been show to improve a child's performance in school. After eight months of keyboard lessons, preschoolers tested showed a 46 percent boost in their spatial IQ, which is crucial for higher brain functions such as complex mathematics.

-.Rauscher and Shaw

A Gallup Survey on American's attitudes toward music revealed that 93 percent of the Gallup Survey respondents agreed music is part of a well rounded education and 88 percent believe music helps a child's overall intellectual development.
- 1994 Gallup Survey

"I believe arts education in music, theater, dance, and the visual arts is one of the most creative ways we have to find the gold that is buried just beneath the surface. They [children] have an enthusiasm for life, a spark of creativity and vivid imaginations that need training training that prepares them to become confident young men and women."

- U.S. Secretary of Education of Education Richard W. Riley


"Music, to me, was - is - representative of everything I like most in life. It's beautiful and fun, but very rigorous. If you wanted to be good you had to work like crazy. It was a real relationship between effort and reward. My musical life experiences were just as important to me, in terms of forming my development, as my political experiences or my academic life."

- President Bill Clinton. From The Gifts of Music , copyright 1994 by Music Educators National Conference