A discussion of children's education and welfare must invariably sweeps across the many facets that comprise them. Each is a mosaic of sorts, with colorful pieces contributing in complex ways to form the whole of his physical, social, intellectual, and emotional selfhood. In helping a child to achieve his integrated and holistic self, parents and teachers are wise to want to examine his "pieces", to check carefully on the conditions of each one and to help in polishing, restoring, and maintaining them. A child's "mosaic" includes his logical, verbal, kinesthetic, physical, social, and artistic parts and pieces. All deserve attention, as each adds its own luster to the child's mosaic whole.

Children's musical enculturation is already well under way by the time they enter their school years. Although by no means completely set, their sensitivity to certain musical styles, their uses of music for particular occasions, and their musical vocabularies and grammars are already gelling. Their family and community experiences have influenced their perceptions of what music means to them, and they enjoy and value particular types of music as a result of these experiences. With schooling comes most children's first formal education in music, even as their informal learning continues at home. Lessons may follow, even as enculturation continues. In important ways, the home and school-and the efforts of parents and teachers-can take children from who they musically are to all that they can musically become.

As we intently listen to and watch children, as we talk to them and with them about music, we become aware of their musical interests. Through our observations and conversations, we gain the information we need about children and their music so that we can design a plan for their further education and training. We then no longer speak from some vague and neutral conception of children, music, and pedagogy, nor from too broad a curricular scope, but from what our own ears and eyes have taught us about them. We consider interventions for nurturing their full capacities to perceive, perform, and create music, and we route our course with full knowledge of the music that our children have known in their pasts, that they want to know, and that we think they full well should know.

The design we draw of music for children is a balance, a give-and-take between children and us-the parents and teachers-whose responsibility they are. If our plan is carefully considered, founded on the music of their play and leisure, kindled by the music of their hopes and dreams, and shaped by the specialized skills we can deliver to them in lessons and class instruction, they will fully realize their capacities as musically expressive individuals. Music is for every child, after all: a god-given right to which they all have access. As they attain their wholeness of being, the musical pieces are some of the brightest, most shining parts of their mosaic selves.

An excerpt from Dr. Campbell's book "Songs in Their Heads - Music and its Meaning in Children's Lives", Oxford University Press 1998

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