Microtone Music Notes

A connection between Kindermusik and the US Space Program? Read on...

Follow up:

I had a small epiphany this evening while watching a fascinating (if a bit dramatic) documentary about the Apollo 11 lunar landing in August of 1969. The flight director, Chris Kraft, was commenting about how the flight engineers in Mission Control (and the astronauts themselves) were exploring the unknown like children learning to walk.

Interesting! Imagine it: every day, all over the world, countless millions of lap babies are growing into crawlers, and then on into toddlers. This neural explosion happens under the "mission control" of the master computer in the brain which executes a miraculous program that brings about this growth. For the child, it is an enormous adventure. All the elements of day-to-day life that adults take entirely for granted -- of which we are almost entirely unconscious -- are new discoveries for the child. That toddler is in an environment as new and unexplored as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin experienced on the moon.

And like those two brave astronauts, the child (hopefully) has a support network: parents, siblings, grandparents, extended family, friends. We read the telemetry, monitor the feedback, make sure there's food and water and warmth and love. Our job is to provide guidance and context to those first tentative cognitive steps.

But it is still the child who must actually take those steps. And to her, the world is a wondrous mystery. Nothing -- absolutely nothing -- is familiar. And yet, they eventually almost all learn to walk. And talk. And reason. Pretty much by teaching themselves.

We have learned a lot about the neural processes that are involved. And Kindermusik educators have an amazing arsenal of tools at our disposal to engage and heighten those processes. BUT... we never forget that the child actually does the work. When I watch a toddler in a Village class experiencing up and down in a systematic way, or playing vocal games, or staring very intently at the shaker I'm slowly rotating in front of him, I know I'm seeing a tiny scientist performing cognitive experiments as complex and compelling (and in an environment as challenging!) as those the astronauts conducted on the moon.

You see these experiments in every single Kindermusik class, over and over again. Every single one. What a blessing and a miracle to be so privileged as to be allowed to be part of a child's growth in this way. Because it's true: every time a child learns to walk, to talk, to sing, she is reenacting in herself the entire miracle of human life itself. She is taking that "giant leap for mankind" all over again.