The Importance Of STEM Education

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Aristotle once said “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance”. Personally, music has been a part of my life for the majority of my existence. I have participated in the music programs at my local schools throughout the entirety of my education thus far and I plan to expand my knowledge in the following years at university. Much like many other students, music has become such a vital part of my life; I plan on continuing my musical passion for the years to come. Throughout my years in music, I have also experienced threats from the school district, the state, and even the nation to take away the funding for music programs in public schools. Now music programs face the instability of …show more content…

Over the last several years, there has been a fourteen percent increase for jobs in the STEM field (U.S. Department of Education). Acts such as NCLB and CCSS have been subsequently implemented in order to match the increasing demand for STEM jobs. The U.S. Department of Education highly supports the rise of STEM through helping to “assist educators in implementing effective approaches for improving STEM teaching and learning; facilitating the dissemination and adoption of effective STEM instructional practices nationwide; and promoting STEM education experiences that prioritize hands-on learning to increase student engagement and achievement”. Even so, removing classes such as music and theatre will only hurt the students. STEM will not teach the students every aspect to set them up for success out in the real world. Steve Jobs once said that “it’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough — that it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing”. Arts subjects such as music only helps develop skills that STEM already implements plus it teaches communicative and flexible skills that STEM fails to teach. Laura Brown, author of The Benefits of Music Education supported the latter: “Research has also found a causal link between music and spatial intelligence, which means that understanding music can help children visualize various elements that should go together, like they would do when solving a math problem”. Catterall mentions the same concept: “music contributes to thinking skills and dispositions that show up in cognitive measures, to detectable gains in certain spatial and mathematical capacities, and to early-age measures of intelligence”. While many believe that music is just a foo-foo and mundane subject, it encompasses all