Chorus America survey: Choral singing makes kids smarter, too
A new survey - from Chorus America, natch - reports that choral singing correlates with adults being all-around better citizens.
There’s more. It also finds that singing in a chorus helps children in a variety of ways: 70 percent of the parents of choral-singing youngsters who participated believe that their children have gained self-confidence, self-discipline, and better memory skills.
Their teachers are even more enthusiastic: 80 percent (”across multiple academic disciplines”) of the teachers surveyed agree that “choir participation can enhance numerous aspects of a child’s social development and academic success. Educators also observe that children who sing are better participants in group activities, have better emotional expression, and exhibit better emotional management.”
90 percent of the participating teachers “believe singing in a choir can keep some students engaged in school who might otherwise be lost—this is particularly true of educators (94%) who describe the ethnicity of their schools as diverse.”
And children who sing in choirs “get significantly better grades than children who have never sung in a choir,” with 45 percent getting all or mostly As in math (against 38 percent of non-singers), and 54 percent do get those grades in various language arts classes (versus 43 percent).
That all makes sense: there’s a definite correlation between music and math (band and orchestra parents would no doubt say the same), and when you’re a singer, you’re constantly engaging with words, language structure, and meaning. Singing in a choir demands a lot of discipline of a sort that most children don’t encounter elsewhere.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that choral singing opportunities for children are declining: one in four teachers reported that there were no choir programs in their schools, while one in five parents said there were no children’s choruses in their communities.
