Or, more specifically, in your case, why should a school spend limited resources in a music program when it could be spending that money on the so-called "basics" of education? After all, we should be practical in our educational emphasis. However, a quick look at these practical basics reveals what could be a distressing truth. Aside from the survival courses such as learning to cook, how to drive a car, and how to communicate, we are teaching courses that will not be directly practical to very many students at all.

How many of you give much thought to the electrons whirring around the atoms that make up all matter around and in you? Remember the order that the electron shells fill? Was it the "p" shell and then the "s" shell, or the other way around? Or maybe it doesn't matter to you. Ask the doctors on the board if they can remember, or if it matters to them either. Yet most of us went through that one.

My interest in aviation prompted many a well-meaning, but misinformed person to counsel me to take lots of math. I went through four years of algebra and high-powered math only to discover that I balance my check book with fourth grade arithmetic like everyone else and figure my taxes according to a chart. As for aviation, time-distance problems of the 7th-grade variety are figured on a handy dandy flight computer which takes as much time to learn to use as it does to learn how to do the problem.

But, you say, what of the student who wants to be a chemist? Or what about the student whom God has given a talent for math? I add what about the student whose talent is music? How many of the students we run through math and chemistry classes will become mathematicians and chemists? Very, very few. Maybe not even enough to warrant continued funding of math and chemistry programs. Now I am getting carried away.

Every elementary student in the Potomac Conference has had years of math and science, but the elective science courses at the academy don't fill with any more students than the music courses. And what kind of a pool or background do music courses draw on? Two years ago, when I first moved here, in cooperation with the Conference Education Secretary, I surveyed every fourth through eighth grader in the conference about music skills. Of approximately 1,500 students, and I received nearly 100 percent response, only 85 students had ever had the chance to study a musical instrument (not including piano). Many of these had started when they attended public school and now because they were in an Adventist school they no longer could take and had dropped.

The number who were getting vocal training was only slightly better, and piano some better also. A quick check of a few of the teachers who didn't return their surveys found that none of their students could check yes to anything so they didn't bother to return them.

Just think of what could be done if all our students studied music in the elementary school! And why not?' How will music affect their lives as adults and even now? Music is not some formula to be learned and then forgotten. It is a God-given talent to be developed, and possibly more important it is an issue to be faced daily.

Music almost literally surrounds us from the moment we wake until we go to sleep at night. Some people even use it for an alarm clock. Music is used to sell us everything from toothpaste to cigarettes to sex. It affects the way we shop for groceries with one type of music, and another type helps us buy mod clothes. It sells both politics and religion, yes religion, all types. This music is not casually piped at you. Advertizers don't pay huge sums for their ditties, and stores don't subscribe to music systems for nothing. This stuff really works and that translates into dollars and cents. Companies like Muzak and others have made a fortune designing music that helps change your behavior according to the needs of their subscribers.

The implications of this are serious. This music is designed to affect you subliminally. The interesting thing is that while it works on all of us to a certain degree, the less you know about music the better it works. The less tools you have for intelligently evaluating what you hear, the less likely you are to make an evaluation. The more you allow yourself to be exposed to something you have not or cannot make a decision about, the more that decision is made for you, possibly without your consent or knowledge.

It is interesting that people who know little or nothing about music are most sure that it doesn't affect them. C. S. Lewis says that imperturbable conceit is almost always associated with incurable ignorance.

Another tragic result of lack of music education can be seen each week in churches throughout the Potomac Conference. How often do you walk into a church and immediately notice that it has a grave lack of skilled mathematicians and chemists? But oh how often I've noticed the lack of musical training! The worship we render God through music is (I'll go ahead and use the word) usually inferior in quality of musical expression and is often in poor taste.

There are a few people in positions of influence and authority at the college and other institutions in this conference who would try to sell you a cheap quick fix for music education. These people believe that there is virtue in buzzing your lips on a trumpet or wiggling your fingers on a clarinet, no matter what comes out the far end. I've even heard the idea that in order to attract students to our music programs that we should produce "shows" to compete with what is available in town. Also that the old ideas of music education can never work with today's youth. We need to appeal to the greatest number of students possible by playing their kind of music.

If music is only an idle human creation to amuse man during his extra time away from more practical pursuits, why was the highest created being in Heaven, next to the God Head Himself, the choir director? This ultimate musician, prowling around the earth seeking whom he may devour, has to be a sobering and even frightening thought to anyone who undertakes to direct teenagers to Heaven.

Jim Testerman