El Sistema

Dear Friends,

I am on the Board of MacPhail Center for Music whose mission is to transform lives through music education.  At a committee meeting at MacPhail today, I was reminded of El Sistema, an amazing program in Venezuela that has a long history of transforming the lives of the neediest children of Venezuela through classical music.  Here is a link to the US website for El Sistema. As those of us who understand the power of music know, music gives children self-esteem and confidence which can help to break the cycles of poverty and crime.  It is not that the children become professional musicians.  It is that their lives have meaning, and they can see away out of poverty.

There are many United States music organizations that are trying to figure out how to adapt El Sistema  to the United States.  Actually adapting the program to the United States is not all that hard.  Children in poverty are children in poverty all over the world.  The really hard part is that in the United States, we say that we don't have the money for such a program.  We always have money for jails and wars but not to save and educate our children.

El Sistema is almost entirely funded by the Venezuelan government.  Venezuela has about 26 million people.  The CBS program "60 Minutes" reports (here) that El Sistema has about 300,000 kids in it at any given time and close to 800 orchestras, ensembles and choirs.  It also reports that the program costs about $80 million.  If those numbers are correct, El Sistema spends about $300 per child per year.  What an incredible financial deal.  Children are given self-esteem and confidence, they are given hope to get out of poverty, they avoid lives of crime and become successful citizens at way less than the cost of having them in the criminal justice system.  The United States has a population a little over 10 times the population of Venezuela so an equivalent per capita expenditure would be just under $1 billion per year.  Even if it costs more to conduct this program in the United States, the cost would still be a very small number, especially compared to the benefits and the costs that would not be incurred if the program works well.

There are certain obligations that governments have.  Among those are to give all of the country's children a chance to succeed which means to provide them with education that gives them literacy, knowledge, values, historical understanding, creativity, hope, self-esteem and confidence.  Our education system is failing when judged by this standard.  We need to use our resources, expertise and creativity to improve our education system.  We need to be willing to look outside our borders to find methods that work and adapt them to our own use.  We are a great country, but we have lots to learn from other countries.  We also need the will to pay for education.  It is the right thing to do to meet our obligations as a society.  It is also  financially the most efficient thing to do.  We will have less crime and a much better and more creative work force which will lead to a much stronger economy.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal