When I was in fifth grade, I started learning how to play cornet in elementary school. I practiced but didn’t enjoy it. I expected to be able to play with little effort; I expected easy “perfection” and didn’t find it. The sound coming out of the bell of that horn didn’t come close to what I wanted to hear.

During the following summer we moved to a community in which good public schools for poor families — with music classes — were not a priority. So, even though I still had my cornet, I no longer played it. Given our income after the move, private lessons were out of the question. My father tried teaching me how to play piano (he was an excellent pianist), but two perfectionists sitting on the same piano bench didn’t work.

If I had always been able to participate in an elementary school band program, I might have perceived and found success, not by achieving perfection, but by learning that performing music well is about getting into the music and sharing it with audiences. It’s not about perfection at all. I think my life turned out OK, without that musical experience in school, but I still wonder what might have been.

These memories are coming to the surface lately because of what I fear is going to happen to music education here in Freeborn County. Our schools are facing cuts, whether we’re prepared for them or not. Reductions are going to come because of shrinking enrollment, funding delays that end up being cuts from the state, more expensive health insurance for employees, and higher prices for just about everything. Are reductions a certainty? Will they happen within the next year or hold off for a couple of years? There’s pressure building and something is going to have to give. If the pattern holds from other places and years past, music instruction will be one of the targets. Staff, courses or both could be cut. While everything will likely be on the table if and when reductions are discussed, cuts to music and art are likely to stay high on that list.

There’s a whole bunch of reasons for this, but at the top of the list is this one: No mandatory “tests” that count for anything with the state or federal governments. And right after it is this one: Music programs are expensive — instruments to buy and maintain, music to purchase, rehearsal and storage spaces that don’t really work for other kinds of subjects.

Unfortunately, one more thing is also true. Music, as a fine art, is something that is often perceived by school boards, administrators and taxpayers as something that gets in the way. There are those who think anything other than the basics — readin’, ’ritin’ and ’rithmetic — is a waste of time and money. Music is considered an extra, not an essential.

Against all of that, the only cost “savings” music offers is that the teachers of music work with large groups of students all at the same time. They offer a class size economy of scale that can be difficult or impossible in classes like math or English. Oh, and music classes are usually more “fun” than the basics.

But is music in the schools really getting in the way? Is it really an extra or is it essential?

Starting in the late 1980s, some educators started asking those questions in a more organized, scientific way. As they studied student achievement — including test scores — they learned that the fine arts, including music education, make a big difference in how students learn (including test scores) and on their attitudes towards school. Instrumental music in particular had a noticeable effect on progress and test scores in math. Even learning about music was enough to help those students, too. Learning how to listen — to intervals, to chords, to what makes really good music interesting — also translated into better attitudes, scores and grades.

I wish our society valued music education because of the ways it enhances the quality of our lives through music performed by amateurs instead of professionals — community bands and orchestras, community theater, community and church choirs. Those “qualities” in our lives, however, aren’t keeping music programs intact in public schools. But before we point fingers at music and art when it comes to funding cuts, it might be good to pay attention to the research on what we would be losing in classrooms far away from the rehearsal rooms.

Albert Lea resident David Rask Behling teaches at Waldorf College in Forest City, Iowa, and lives with his wife and children in Albert Lea. His column appears every other Tuesday.