Teaching Children To Sing Is A Life Long Gift

One of the greatest educational benefits you can offer a child is teaching children how to sing. Singing does many things in the human brain for making connections between neurons, by helping kids associate words with certain activities. Children who sing are much likelier to hang structures together for retaining knowledge, and are likelier to make associations between words and objects shown to them when they’re linked by singing.

This aspect of teaching children to sing is nothing new; singing your lessons has been a part of educational pedagogy since the Greeks and Romans, where in addition to several techniques about building the palace of the mind, the key lessons were tied to singing to reinforce the connection between the data and the comprehension mechanism. It was preserved in the monasteries of Europ during the middle ages, where singing ones devotions helped a monk retain knowledge, and acolytes and initiates were shown their tasks by a friar who sang the steps as they were being shown.

This practice advanced in the Middle Ages, where it was (again) applied to children and teaching children to sing, though mostly for those wealthy enough to have tutors. The Renaissance expanded on this procedure, but it wasn’t until the Reformation that it really hit the massive bulk of the populace, with the movement to present the teachings of the Church in the common language of the people rather than Latin.

One of the leaders in teaching children to sing as an educational process was England, with compulsory education, and its intellectual inheritor, the United States. Both benefited from the development of the printing press, making both hymnals and text books much cheaper to produce, and putting a significant benefit on universal literacy.

With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, and literacy needing wider acceptance, and then the creation of both recorded media and radio broadcasting, it was common practice to make things that had to be remembered tied to a system of mnemonics (the ancient Greek system) and to make the mnemonic catchy – presenting it as a jingle. This is why nearly every radio and television commercial uses music. When it came to children’s education, this had slipped out of the mainstream until the 1970s, when School House Rock, a series of 3 minute clips on various topics, were aired on ABC as part of the requirements for educational content for children. These little cartoon clips taught children to sing and taught them history, mathematics, and several other concepts by associating them with catchy jingles. Public Broadcasting caught into the same trend with The Electric Company and Sesame Street, where similar processes happened.

There are many benefits to teaching children to sing, and most of them will help them throughout their lives; studies of Alzheimer’s patients have shown that those who imprinted information by singing had some advantages in retaining their knowledge and fighting off the effects of the disease.

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