Perhaps the greatest omission occurs in the very first stage of life. The child is born totally dependent upon its senses for information and search, and upon continued protection.

Touch is without doubt the first sense. Skin is a surface sensitive to pressure and temperature, moving contact and texture.

Taste is also basically touch, and the infant’s fingers and mouth are both, in their explorations, guided by the sense of touch.

Sound is already audible prenatally. The foetus reacts to sound, to music. Sound is but touch once removed, for the vibrations actually act upon our tympanums, setting them in sympathetic motion, in analogous vibration.

The aural and the oral are equally concerned with sound : the first one receiving sounds in a spherical area, the latter emitting them from one specific point.

Sounds, listened to with the same criteria as music - meaningful words as well as well as still unintelligible ones - are the first sensations a newborn experiences, which enables recognition, orientation, equilibrium and which generates the memory and the anticipation of pleasure, of fear, or curiosity.  The Criteria concerned are texture and resonance, pitch (female or male, mother or father), amplitude, dynamics, direction and all sorts of variations.

Through listening, through the gift of hearing, a child establishes his first contact with his environment. Through his first cry, the « primal scream », he establishes his presence, makes himself audibly known and elicits response. It is not an exaggeration to say that voice and music are what the newborn is first attuned to, at the very outset of life.

The sense of smell is perhaps the most sensitive of all our senses, for it conveys the silent proximity, the distance of living existence - animal, flower, food - Smell helps us to distinguish before food reaches our mouth, whether it is edible or not, fresh or rotten. It also helps to detect the proximity of love.

Breathing, the first exhalation, is the bellows which fires our energy, audible and assertive. It proclaims the independence of a new life, self-reliant and self-propelled. This pulsating and breathing being is in touch with its environment. It communicates with it through sound and music (via the air) long before it can use speech.

Although the slow, healthy breathing of air in singing has a quiet periodicity of its own in the swelling and expelling bellows of the lungs, the rhythm of pulse begins with the heart (this is the basis of bodily movement), in locomotion, in gymnastics and above all in the expressive activity of dancing.

From the above it follows, as day follows night, that music, the sound of the voice, listening and singing, is the very natural, communicating and civilizing experience of life, immediately available to the child.

It is essential that a rich and civilizing experience of the senses should precede any abstract learning by symbols (alphabet) or structure (grammar).

It is far more important to acquire the human skills of beautiful speech and clear sequential thought than those of reading and writing, which come later. For one thing, oral memory (be it of music, poetry or vocabulary) MUST precede reading and writing. Just like hearing preceeds seeing, so must speech and thought precede reading and writing which are visual skills. Hence, the importance of drawing and painting before learning how to read and write.

Abstract studies like mathematics and geometry follow from music. The laws of overtones (multiplication, division), of counterpoint and harmony (resolution of dissonances and angles) are applicable in living situations as well. Music is both therapy and oral mathematics, among other definitions. Geometry follows from drawing as the aesthetics of proportion, colour. Decoration and gardening follow from both music and painting.

As the child becomes aware, observant and self-expressive, the art of mime - communication through face and body revealing us to each other - is of great benefit. Acting, with the addition of spoken texts, follows.

The cultivated use of hands is of prime importance. All forms of crafts - including furniture, dress and shoe-making, pottery, etc., playing a music instrument or even eating with chopsticks, involve coordinating fingers, eyes and mouth, so are useful.

As the child becomes even more independante and wants to test his strength, courage and skill, apart from group sports and the solitary skill of swimming which should begin at the very earliest age, a martial art, fencing or aikido, focuses energies and instills self-respect, courtesy and gratitude.

The human states and emotions of love, hate, serenity, exaltation, solitude,  compassion, agressiveness, joy in nature, exuberance, all these must be expressed and the talents for expressing them - and also our thoughts - must be cultivated through the civilizing disciplines of arts and crafts. For each time we prevent the expression of an emotion, this emotion and the thinking which derives from it turn sour and generate frustrations, prejudice or anger. In the long term, this negative thinking may give rise to violence on a smaller or bigger scale.

Music does not lie. Speech is often insufficient, the written text can lack precision, the printed text is often even deliberately devious. Nature has done things well in making the child know the civilizing truth of the singing voices of his mother and father, before discovering adults’ prejudices, hypocrisy and lies. It is also a good thing that art norms (play) should precede the norms of daily survival, because the latter alone can only cause the cruel death of sublime immortality.

Yes, it is Art,  through play and achievement, that teaches the protected small child and surrounds him with its blessings. Art, with its dreams, its imagination, its philosophy, that prepares the child to knowledge, before the child is exposed to the strict rigours of life. That is why adults return to art, to handicrafts, to the art of living, to their dreams, as soon as they regain a certain level of security, the same security as the one they used to know when they were children.

Let us respect, when we teach, this order of succession of steps established, if I may say so, by God himself, without referring to any religion in particular.

Yehudi Menuhin