Last Thursday, October 30th, was a pretty awesome today for music education in Australia. At exactly 12:30 EDT, over 500,000 school students sang "Paint You a Song" in unison to support Music Education in Schools.
This event was created by an organization called Music: Count Us In which is a non-profit run by the Music Council of Australia with backing also from the Australian government. A review of Music Education in Australia completed in 2005 demonstrated the lack of meaningful music education in too many of the countries schools. Music: Count Us In was created to help push back the other way, offering resources to teachers, schools and communities to help offer better music training across the board to Australian students.
Music: Count Us In has been holding these events now for 7 years with each year getting bigger and stronger. This year over 500,000 (that's a half a Million) school students from 2100 schools in Australia will participate in the event. The song chosen to be sung is "Paint You a Song" which was written by 5 high school students from across Australia working with music industry mentor Harry James Angus, and Program Ambassador, John Foreman.
For more information on this excellent organization please visit www.MusicCountUsIn.org.au. Here are a couple of press articles from Australia about the event including some video clips from the event itself:
- Canberra Times - Matthew-Mitcham-Dives-in-to-Perform-With-Canberra-Schools
- Standard Net: South-West-Pupils-in-Harmony-with-the-Whole-of-Australia
It so wonderful and amazing to see this type of support form music in the land down under. We'll definitely be in contact with Music: Count Us In in the near future to see how we might learn from their successes to help improve music education here in the US.
That's all for today folks - hope you had a great Halloween weekend (twick or tweet) and don't eat too much candyyyyyy!
Music, Love & Laughter
Vincent James @ LoveSongs.com
No comments:
Post a Comment