Excerpt from Learning to Listen by Means of the Gramophone: A Course in the Appreciation of Music for Use in Schools

I crossed the Charles River, that sunders Boston from Cambridge, took a trolley car to the famous Longfellow house, and walked along to the wooden mansion, which next to the White House itself was perhaps the most frequent objective of the enquiring traveller and the interviewing journalist. Its master, President Eliot, then over eighty years of age, had spent nearly fifty of those years in control of Harvard, and had seen all the developments in educational thought and practice which half a century at that busy period of the world's progress had brought with it. In a very interesting conversation he gave me some of his conclusions, and one of these was that music was, as an element in education of tar greater value than had even yet been realised. A good music school, he said (i give his actual words as I noted them at the time), gives an admirable training of eye, ear and hand, and imparts an accurate and faithful use of all the senses. It'is through a training of the senses to a high degree that the human race has attained all its most valuable knowledge, including the applied sciences of the last hundred years. Music is not physical training alone, but also intellectual and moral training. It is by a wonderful oo-ordination ot the senses, acting in common with the imagination and the reasoning power, that the greatest discoveries of the human mind are wrought out, and put to do the work of humanity. Music is not a mere recreation, a refined hobby. Actually it takes its place as an education - as - a means of developing the human child of drawing out latent powers and enabling him to make the best of himself. So far from being a special subject, to be reserved for the children of the well-to-do, music is one of the very best things for children who will leave school at fourteen. A musical training is the child's birthright, though often he may at present be deprived of it nothing will more perfectly cultivate the human spirit.

Now President Eliot had a feeling of urgency in this matter that we here do not fully share at that time there were eighteen million children in the schools of the United States, and of these only five million were receiving any kind of systematic musical training. This proportion is immensely lower than with us, for throughout all our elementary schools and most of our secondary schools systematic musical training is given, and our problem is merely - can we improve our system? If our training does not tend to the production of the humane results promised by President Eliot, then our system is wrong somewhere. If it is not an education - 'fl means of develop ing the human child, of drawing out latent powers, an Opportunity of cultivating the human spirit, it is some where incomplete, and this, I think, is actually the case.

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