Singing as the optimal educational medium - Part III Education

In the last two posts I have claimed that singing is an optimal medium for conveying information, both from an engineering perspective and a neuroscience perspective. I want to tie it all in with education. I believe that due to the points raised before, mainly that singing conveys the optimal combination of language (content) and melody (affect) and that our brain is wired to remember dynamical patterns apparent in singing, one can use singing to educate and teach in an optimal manner.

First I want to make a distinction between what I think can and cannot be taught with singing. Singing is optimal for teaching content-driven material, such as history lessons, as well as higher-level concepts, such as philosophy, law and basic science. However, I believe it is less adequate for teaching repetition-requiring and manual dexterity material, e.g. writing and algebra. Whenever there is knowledge to be learned, singing can form a "wrapper" for that knowledge which augment it in several ways: (i) it can imbue affect into the knowledge, which is usually lacking in dry written textbooks. For example, historical events are immersive in emotional content and singing about them can strike a chord with our emotional neuronal circuits to form more long-lasting memory of the knowledge itself. This is obviously nothing new, as ballads of fallen heroes and great events have been common in the Middle Ages as an effective medium of passing knowledge. (ii) The melody and dynamical patterns of singing can create a cohesive web of knowledge, so that events or facts are tied together via the melody. The simple a-b-c song is a great example of this fact.

As written above, these ideas are not new, but I believe they were forgotten or neglected in recent decades, as the written word has claimed priority in our educational system. I propose a project of re-introducing singing in the educational system in a more structured, scientific-based and optimal manner. This can be done by a comprehensive reformulation of the educational curriculum to the singing medium. In other words, one can take the required body of knowledge and write and compose songs about each and every "fact" in it, in such as a way so as to utilize the known (or researched) relationships between melody, emotion, memory and content to enhance memory and understanding. History lessons are a good place to start, although basic science is just as adequate.

I must stress two things. I do not suggest that singing supplants the written word, but augment it to enhance memory and enthusiasm about the material. Furthermore, several things, e.g. writing and algebra, cannot be taught in this way since they must be practiced over and over again. Nevertheless, their principles can be taught, in my opinion, via singing which will ease the pain of practice. Furthermore, I believe we can all agree that hearing songs is must nicer than reading and memorizing endless texts.

Finally, I want to share the wonder of They MightBe Giants, which I learned to love due to their passion to the topic discussed about. This shows that while optimality and research are important (and lacking) qualities in this specific field, the performing arts are just as crucial.