[I remember when I thought that my public-school music classes were awful, because the music we sang seemed so dippy, but eventually I was thankful that I had that instruction. Just stick with it, and wait for the great surprises.]

I don't often find myself in the position of defending the performance of the public schools, but I have to agree that it's a lot easier to critize the music teacher than to do any better. I recall with regret that in the 1980's some of my children were in the chorus, and as a friend of both the band director and the vocal music teacher I could probably have offered to help, and never found the time.

When I was in the band in the 1950's we would sometimes play music from Broadway musicals, but not much if any from the current country or rock that we heard on the radio, and I don't recall a lot of complaining about that. We all more or less understood that if we tried to take those songs out of their medium and put it into ours, it probably wasn't going to work very well. A few of us had a little German band on the side that played more of a variety of stuff, and we managed to pick up a free meal from time to time for playing, besides just having fun.

If the teacher is any good at all, it's better to learn to sing something, more or less anything, and then we can go on to do whatever we feel like on our own time.

Clearly, what we need is national standards for the band, the chorus, and the elementary school music classes, with a list of approved music provided by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, and standardized tests at each grade level to make sure each school is doing the job of teaching those, and we'll just cut off funding for any school that's below the 10th percentile on those tests. Shortly all the money for schools will be distributed from the center, so those who pay the piper will be able to take care of calling the tunes.

Thanks for your comments.

RWH