Points people have made about the dangers of school folk music programs called up a memory for me. We had an ambitious but doomed music curriculum when I was in the lower grades. Year by year, the teachers played recordings from Ghana and Louisiana and Ireland, and while I listened intently the other kids rolled their eyes and made faces and snickered. The teachers handed us acoustic instruments and the other kids refused to improvise or practice as I itched to strike up a bodhran beat. By sixth grade, the books were passed out but hardly opened or referred to. They were intended to build on what had come before, so they made no sense.

The difference between me and the other kids? My mother was a member of the local arts council and a public radio volunteer. Roving folkies stayed at her house. I learned about a dozen of the Child Ballads painlessly from a couple from the mainland who played Kodiak annually; I had no idea for years that they had a common identity other than "really cool songs." She got comp tickets to everything and bought all the records on sale during intermission. And our arts council was (still is) headed by geniuses. Our isolated town has hosted Sally Rogers, Bo Diddley, Dave Brubeck, Lou Reed, John Hammond, Joan Baez, and Jimmy Buffett, who showed up on his own and got into a fight to protect a lady's honor, as the story goes, as well as countless fiddlers, dulcimer players, jazzmen, blues men, classical quartets, Native American performers from all over the continent, every flavor of Celtic musician and a capoeira troupe. We had no TV at our house, but the radio was always on; the dial never moved from 100.1 FM, where you could hear everything from Kiss to live local bluegrass depending on time of day. The kids who sneered at the music curriculum had American Top 40.

But earlier, in preschool and after-kindergarten day care, two nice ladies came in every day and played "Five Hundred Miles," "The Sidewalks of New York," "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean," and a whole bookful of other songs, and twenty-plus years later my old classmates could still remember, with a smile, how they went.

So I'd like to expand on Deckman's insight. I realize now that the best person to name an education program after is Mom, or Dad or Uncle Phil who sings all the time or Grandma who knows every tune in Southern Harmony. Get the kids before they realize that there is a whole music industry aimed at their lowest common denominator and proclaim their independence by submitting to it. Sing them to sleep with "The Skye Boat Song." When they are in a loud mood, play "The Ballad of Sir Geordie Gordon" or "Goodnight Irene" with the volume up to 8 and encourage them to bellow along. Sing "Five Hundred Miles" and "One, I Love" in the car. Yeah, sooner or later they'll rebel. But as with church, when they have kids of their own they'll come back.