THE PIANO EDUCATION

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jul 9, 1894

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 20, No. 35.

THE PIANO EDUCATION.

An Eastern exchange says:—

"The piano is the chief thing in the way of women's education. So long as a girl has to spend several hours a day at her music, the cause of education must languish. There is scarcely a mother who in her own case does not know that the hours spent on music were wasted. Yet she insists that her daughter will repeat her experience."

This is all true enough, but a good deal more might be said about the baneful effects of the piano. Thousands of farms are mortgaged to-day because of the piano habit, and thousands of honest farmers' daughters have

been utterly spoiled by the instrument that has put a plaster on the farm. Idleness, extravagance, dress, expensive music lessons, distaste for work, and a contempt for working people, follow the advent of the piano into the houses of people of slender means. The first cost of the instrument is perhaps more than can be safely borne—too often it represents a wearing and exacting debt—but the consequences are even more disastrous. The girls must bang on the piano when they ought to be at work, or educating themselves for the realities of life, and there is a constant outlay for music and music lessons. Too often the net result is disappointed and perhaps impoverished parents, spoiled girls, and wretched musicians, who can play just well enough to shudder at the thought of cooking or darning socks.—Oakland Times.