Aweary-looking but stalwart Peter Simon sits in his office, mere days from the opening of Koerner Hall, the curvaceous concert venue that marks the culmination of a decades-long journey for the Toronto-based Royal Conservatory of Music. But when its president surveys the conservatory's core educational function, the road ahead stretches to the horizon. And, at least for now, it's a lonely path.
"We are, in effect, the sole entity concerned with music and the arts for all. And we're a parallel structure now to the public education system, which has withdrawn from arts engagement for students," Simon says. "The irony is that we're supposed to be heading into the age of creativity and the innovation that creativity fosters."
The Royal Conservatory has taken on a broader mandate during Simon's 18-year tenure, pledging to "develop human potential" through music and the broader arts. Simon is trying to get people back to an emotional connection to the arts that he feels our education system has drifted away from.
The arts are not just an "entertainment vehicle," he says, not just "a subject area - that's such a misguided notion. The arts are the essence of life." And while opening a state-of-the-art concert hall and pioneering childhood arts education may seem to have little to do with each other, Simon sees them as intricately linked: Conservatory students will get master classes from artists visiting the new hall, and some lucky public-school students will get a chance to perform from the Koerner Hall stage.
If the conservatory can get kids stimulated with experiences like those, neuroscience shows, they start learning better. Fifteen years ago, Simon and his team - including vice-president, academic, Angela Elster - concluded three years of investigations into how the arts could help develop human potential. They had seen an "alarming decline," says Elster, in arts education in schools, which seemed at odds with what were then newly emerging scientific revelations about how music and the arts are "innately connected to how our brain is wired."
The result of their investigations was the launch of Learning Through the Arts (LTTA), an innovative and expansive program that uses the arts to help children learn better across all disciplines, from math and science to history and geography. LTTA is now employed in 300 to 500 schools each year - guiding 20,000 teachers, and reaching an estimated 100,000 students - and has also stretched its reach to 13 other countries. The program's lessons are available to any school that shows a willingness to get involved.
The Royal Conservatory has been involved in 28 academic studies, and pored over the findings of many more, gleaning reams of information that shows conclusively how early-childhood education in the arts, as well as ongoing immersion in the arts, results in better brain development, happier children, higher test scores and expanded creativity.
In the 1960s, the conservatory set the stage for its current work by bringing German composer Carl Orff's system of musical pedagogy to Canada. Ever since, it has gathered and applied some of the best research on the relationship between music and the brain by such leading figures as McGill University professor Daniel Levitin and American Frances Rauscher. In 2003, the conservatory and University of Toronto professor Glenn Schellenberg published a study together tracking the IQs of 132 six-year-olds. The results: "The children who were physically engaged in music, and vocally engaged, scored higher on IQ tests," says Elster. A national study conducted by the conservatory between 1999 and 2002 showed that Grade 6 students involved in artistic learning scored, on average, 11 percentage points higher in math.
Other studies have shown that neural pathways (connectors of disparate parts of the brain) that have become detached will sometimes reconnect through music. Researchers have also discovered that the amygdala - an almond-shaped bunch of nuclei deep at the heart of the brain, which respond to joy - can be stimulated by music. "And when the amygdala is engaged," says Elster, "we learn."
Elster and Simon acknowledge these things are nothing that artists, parents and educators haven't known intuitively "for 5,000 years." At the same time, concrete evidence is important in understanding what artistic learning achieves - and how to calibrate it.
Globally, LTTA has a $4.5-million annual budget, some of which helps pay for technological advances and curriculum development. Lesson plans for creative, physically interactive teaching units such as "Grade 2 and 3 - Dancing Geometry" are available free to educators on the Internet. In many cases, school boards - including the Toronto District School Board, the Lakehead School Board and the Regina Public School Board - have institutionalized the use of those plans. But often it's simply a principal, a teacher or even a parent taking the initiative.
Much of the rest of the funding is used to train artists and teachers in the complex methodology of arts education the conservatory has crafted over the last decade and a half. Artists are carefully vetted, before being given 30 hours of training each year. They visit classes to instruct teachers in the program and to work with students over a three-year cycle.
More recently, such efforts have spawned a parallel initiative called Living Through the Arts, which primarily targets the elderly and those living with disabilities. The conservatory works with 28 social-service agencies, including Baycrest, a Toronto-based health-sciences centre focused on aging.
Living Through the Arts offers musical and artistic activities to promote the elasticity of the brain, physical and emotional engagement, and discipline. The conservatory's knowledge in this field remains largely anecdotal, but it is compelling: Parkinson's patients, for example, have reported experiencing fewer tremors when music plays a large role in their lives. "Music is a profound diversion that eases that suffering," says Simon.
Elster says schools generally have a better sense of the importance of artistic learning than they did 15 years ago, but even with the conservatory's increasingly national penetration, the LTTA program reaches fewer than 2 per cent of Canadian schools. Now, the conservatory has a satellite centre in Alberta and is pushing for a greater presence in B.C. and New Brunswick. And it is hoping that technological advances - some of which are built into its new home at the Telus Centre for Performance and Learning - will help spread the programs wider through networking and distance learning.
"Our aim has been, from the very beginning, every school. So we know that we still have a job to do," says Elster. "This is a mission. We're committed to this vision."
James Bradshaw