What the Suzuki Method Really Teaches --- Shinichi Suzuki developed a popular approach to learning the violin, but his goal as an educator was to cultivate 'noble hearts.'

"When Shinichi Suzuki died in 1998 at the age of 99, the Japanese violinist and teacher was known around the world as the founder of the Suzuki Method, a hugely popular approach to early music education. According to the Talent Education Research Institute, an organization that Suzuki founded in 1948, about 400,000 children around the globe are now learning to play music the Suzuki way.

Particularly in the U.S., where it was introduced in the late 1950s, the method has become synonymous with the musical education of preschoolers and school-age children. Today, the great majority of those who were very young when they picked up a violin -- or cello, viola, piano or flute -- have likely come across his instructional approach in one form or another.

To Suzuki, who spent his childhood working in his father's violin factory and formed a professional string quartet in 1929, the achievement of a certain level of mastery on the violin was only an example -- albeit a powerful one -- of what all children could accomplish with proper guidance from an early age. His goal wasn't to create professional musicians but to transform society, and he believed that many social ills stemmed from adults' failure to help children fully realize their potential and become enlightened individuals. By children, he meant all children -- whether their potential was great or small, whether it lay in music, mathematics, poetry or athletics. "This method is not education of the violin," he told a reporter in 1977. "It is education by the violin."

Suzuki called his work saino kyoiku, "talent education," and his central goal was to change the way talent is understood. The word is derived from the Greek talanton, signifying a particular weight of money or gold to be compared against other objects on a balance scale. We tend to think of talent as something quantifiable that a person has more or less of; we take for granted that it is unequally distributed.

Suzuki did not accept this common idea of talent, musical or otherwise. Irrespective of their backgrounds and individual differences, all children, he thought, should be measured against their own potential -- which he identified as "natural" or "raw" abilities -- and not against anyone else's. He never denied that children demonstrated different levels of ability or that certain children learned easily where others struggled.

Still, he was adamant that we all come into this world equipped with a tremendous capacity to learn and that we can all become talented in our own ways. According to this view, talent is not a static, inborn quality like eye color. Rather, it is a muscle that can be developed and strengthened regardless of genetics.

What better way to prove his point than to show that, with suitable instruction, any child could learn how to play the violin, an especially challenging musical instrument for beginners? A properly tuned piano allows anyone to produce the right pitches merely by tapping the keyboard. A beginner won't play all the correct notes with proper timing, but each note she plays will sound at the right frequency.

The same isn't true of the violin and other bowed string instruments. It is up to each string player to produce the correct pitches using precise left-hand placement. As for the right hand, that comes with another set of daunting challenges, starting with how to hold the bow.

The Suzuki Method aims to bring elements of fun to otherwise tedious drilling. For instance, students are required to take group lessons in addition to private instruction, with the goal of impressing on youngsters the joy of making music with their peers. Early lessons are full of catchy melodies that appeal to preschoolers. The first of Suzuki's 10 instructional books for violin starts with his arrangement of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," which has become something of a sacred hymn for his movement. The final two volumes feature demanding but equally hummable Mozart concertos.

The 10 books guide the budding violinist step by step through the challenges that cultivate her abilities. These range from holding the instrument and the bow properly to producing a beautiful, even tone, to smoothly shifting left-hand positions over the fingerboard while accurately controlling bow movement with the right arm, and so on.

Completing one Suzuki book and moving on to the next provides a great incentive for a young musician, but students continue to review old pieces. "Twinkle" is no exception: In group lessons, advanced students play it alongside toddlers holding their tiny, 1/16-sized violins. This communal approach makes classical music seem more accessible to anyone willing to do the work.

Parents often turn to the Suzuki Method hoping it will give their children a head start in developing musical talent or, at the very least, a skill that will bring pleasure for a lifetime. The higher such hopes, however, the more easily they can backfire, especially when the motivation is coming more from the parents than the children. In the wrong hands, the Suzuki Method -- like any teaching method -- can turn music-making into a kind of competitive after-school sport, in which passing from one level to the next becomes the main goal.

Suzuki himself recognized this pattern early on. "Having realized that all children on this earth had great potential to learn," he wrote in a 1956 article for instructors, he decided to launch his "social movement," aided by "the high musical senses of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart." To his dismay, however, he soon realized that his biggest challenge would be parents, who often "unknowingly made their children miserable." Rather than guide their children to become the best people they could be, possessing what Suzuki called "noble hearts," those parents became narrowly focused on raising "skilled violin players."

He believed this was a result of a lack of self-reflection on the part of adults, who lost sight of why they wanted their children to learn to play musical instruments in the first place. The broad acceptance that the Suzuki Method enjoys in the U.S. home schooling community attests to that deeper appeal. As one home-school blogger writes, the Suzuki Method trains her children to set realizable goals and work hard for them, while improving their concentration and instilling habits of discipline that can be applied to other tasks.

At its best, the method continues to offer children a set of transferable skills -- one might even call them life skills -- that cannot be taken away, even long after they stop learning music.

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This essay is adapted from Ms. Hotta's new book, "Suzuki: The Man and His Dream to Teach the Children of the World," published Nov. 15 by Harvard University Press." [1]

1. REVIEW --- What the Suzuki Method Really Teaches --- Shinichi Suzuki developed a popular approach to learning the violin, but his goal as an educator was to cultivate 'noble hearts.'
Hotta, Eri. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 22 Oct 2022: C.5.