When you head off to school, you have an opportunity to learn how to play a musical instrument. You will, unsurprisingly, want to play guitar and live out your dreams of becoming a rock star. However, it’s not necessarily impressive to learn an instrument that thousands of people can already play. Alternatively, you could expand your musical horizons and teach classes to play steel drums.
Just think about it for a moment: everyone likes to boast about the fact that they can play an instrument. When someone tells you that they play an instrument that doesn’t fall in line with the drums, guitar or piano cliché, you’ll instantly pique someone’s curiosity. For secondary schools, holding steel pan workshops will help students to dramatically stand out from others.
The Department for Education suggests that more than 400,000 students will be at secondary state schools by 2027. With such a significant increase (almost 15 per cent), you will find every school teaching their students the same instruments. If your school holds lessons on steel drums, you have a better chance of injecting a different musical culture into students.
According to Frontiers in Neuroscience, music lessons provide benefits to children such as “language-based reasoning, short-term memory, planning and inhibition”.
Dr Artur Jaschke, who conducted the research with Dr Henkjan Honing and Dr Erik Scherderm, told Neuroscience News: “Despite indications that music has beneficial effects on cognition, music is disappearing from general education curricula. This inspired us to initiate a long-term study on the possible effects of music education on cognitive skills that may underlie academic achievement.”
Despite a continued push for students to study the sciences, subjects close to the arts are equally as important for stimulating children’s abilities. Every school is looking for creative ways to plug the gap in extracurricular activities. Someday, you could beat the drums about the fact that you can play a musical instrument!