saw a post saying that New Yorkers force their kids to learn to play the recorder in school because they’re secretly looking for one that will be able to solve their rat problem. I can’t stop thinking about it
So, for anyone who wants the actual answer to why we have kids learn "Hot Cross Buns" on the recorder in 4th grade, read on.
Music is not for everyone, but like any lifetime habit/hobby/skill, you should give as many new people the opportunity to try it out as you can and then retain the ones with aptitutde. This is also why we try kids out on sports, chess, physics, shop... Maybe they pick it up, maybe they don't, but when you're young, it doesn't hurt to try your hand at all the things to see what sticks.
However, to give a kid a shot at trying a sport, that'll cost you anywhere from about $15 to $150 bucks, depending on if you're just buying a soccer ball, or if you're buying el cheapo tennis balls, racquet, and net. And before anyone protests that good equipment for those sports is much more expensive than that, yes. Obviously the good stuff is more expensive. We're talking about the stuff you pick up to try a child out on it for their first dip of their toes into the shallow end. You aren't gonna shell out for the spendy stuff unless the kid looks like they're gonna at least have fun playing the sport, let alone actually be good at it. We're looking at just what you need to try it out just a bit.
Music, on the other hand, has uniquely high start up expenses, just to get an instrument. This is Woodwind-Brasswind's shop page for student-model flutes. Here are the trumpets. Trombones. Saxophones. Violins. Drums. And Woodwind-Brasswind is a solid, midrange, reasonably priced seller with a good reputation among musicians. And yeah, sure, there's rental programs and layaways and stuff like that, but there's no getting around it: musical instruments ain't cheap. So if I'm a grade school administrator and someone proposes they hand out about $12,000 of school property to a bunch of nine-year-olds, most of who are never going to respect the equipment we just handed them, I'm gonna go, "Nah, we're not doing that."
Enter the humble recorder.
A plastic recorder costs approximately $10. That one, you can reasonably hand out to a room full of fourth graders, most of whom are not going to keep up music as any kind of discipline, and flog them all through learning "Mary Had A Little Lamb" and get...an acceptable sound for a total beginner from it. Not a discouraging level of terribleness, anyway.
And yeah, there's gonna be those two idiots who use their recorders as swords to duel with, but the school is out $20 bucks for that, rather than $1-$2K if they did it with clarinets. For the kids who aren't interested in becoming musicians, no harm no foul. Release them to go find the thing they will love. And for the ones that are, when you put the real $500-$1000 instrument into their hands, they will appreciate it for its value and not start doing foolish things with it right away.
...Until they hit high school and start wearing their trombone bell as a hat. But by that point, they'll be absorbed enough into the discipline that that's more of the generalized "musicians are weird" than it is that they don't respect the craft.
Because musicians are freaking weird, bro.
