Learning Sanskrit and learning Sastriya Sangeet are not two different things for traditional Indian education. They were part of informal education for all kids. Mothers and grand-mothers were the first teachers. All daily routine activities had corresponding songs. Singing was the way to entertain self. Music instruments were part of daily evening family prayers. After meals, there used to be music/chanting in family.
WE NEVER HAD TO DO RESEARCH TO FIND ITS VALUE! we were highly advanced society!
Now?
Mothers can’t even sing single song!
Grand-mothers are packaged to old age homes.
Kids are hooked to YOUTUBE monster.
Local temples use machines for generating Aarti chores.
Local festivals celebrations happen on DJ tunes or Saregama radio tunes.
There is a huge vaccum of our involvement in community music.
Result?
Our kids’ dysfunctional language skills! And then we cry that 50% students fail in board exams in language papers!
Music, be it singing or playing instrument, has direct relation with our Pranamaya kosh. Prana protects the life.
Now, read the MIT study 😉
Research
How music lessons can improve language skills
Study links piano education with better word discrimination by kindergartners.
http://news.mit.edu/2018/how-music-lessons-can-improve-language-skills-0625
“The children didn’t differ in the more broad cognitive measures, but they did show some improvements in word discrimination, particularly for consonants. The piano group showed the best improvement there,” says Robert Desimone, director of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the senior author of the paper.
The study, performed in Beijing, suggests that musical training is at least as beneficial in improving language skills, and possibly more beneficial, than offering children extra reading lessons. The school where the study was performed has continued to offer piano lessons to students, and the researchers hope their findings could encourage other schools to keep or enhance their music offerings.
Previous studies have shown that on average, musicians perform better than nonmusicians on tasks such as reading comprehension, distinguishing speech from background noise, and rapid auditory processing. However, most of these studies have been done by asking people about their past musical training. The MIT researchers wanted to perform a more controlled study in which they could randomly assign children to receive music lessons or not, and then measure the effects.
They decided to perform the study at a school in Beijing, along with researchers from the IDG/McGovern Institute at Beijing Normal University, in part because education officials there were interested in studying the value of music education versus additional reading instruction.
“If children who received music training did as well or better than children who received additional academic instruction, that could a justification for why schools might want to continue to fund music,” Desimone says.
