Hidden Intellectualism Summary

The American school system has been put under an immense amount of stress in the past few years. Funding has been moved, held back, and/or taken away from various classes. However, one of the largest fights for funding is found in music education. Without funding, music classes are unable to properly educate children in music. With more and more money being taken away, the youngest generation is growing up with less musical intelligence. In order to properly examine the level of necessity for music classes, the economic and social conditions must be explored for the following question: How can increasing musical intelligence at an early age benefit a person later in life?

Ever since the recession hit America, states have cut school funding. General funding per student is lower than it was in 2008 for half of the nation’s states. In order to try and increase money availability for schools, both school districts and individual schools have taken action in the form of job cuts, which, in turn, further harm the economy. The loss

Although musical intelligence is not seen as important or “truly smart” in society, it can still be powerful, and it still is a form of intelligence. Alternative forms of intelligence (those other than “book smarts” like mathematical or linguistic intelligence) are oftentimes overlooked by society. Another aspect of this piece is the view that societal intelligence is important to survival, and can just as easily be used as a reason to consider someone to be smart (Graff). If both musical intelligence and social intelligence are important facets of society, and both can be used to measure somebody’s smarts, musical education should be an appropriate addition to schooling because it has been shown to increase both. Musical education not only increases musical intelligence, but also emotional, interpersonal, and general societal