The System

The other day, my daughter told me Venezuela was producing some of the best young classical musicians in the world. “Venezuela?” I said. “Are you sure you don’t mean another nation—perhaps somewhere in Europe?”

“I don’t think so,” she replied. “I’m pretty sure it’s Venezuela.” She and her violin teacher had recently viewed a 12-minute video about a music program so extraordinary that some maestros are hailing it as “the future of classical music.”

In fact, it is in Venezuela. It’s called El Sistema in Spanish, meaning “The System.” It started 35 years ago with 11 students and an amateur musician who believed classical music was an effective antidote to the societal ills of family breakdown, crime and poverty. “I had a feeling this was the beginning of something very big,” remembers José Antonio Abreu, El Sistema’s creator.

Today, some 300,000 Venezuelan children—most of them coming from impoverished neighborhoods—are enrolled in one of The System’s several hundred orchestras, ensembles and choirs. Enrollment is expected to exceed more than a million within the next two years.

Outside Venezuela, numerous international organizations in more than 25 countries have developed music programs based on Abreu’s model. In Harmony, for example, is the British version of El Sistema. Cellist Julian Lloyd-Webber spearheads the fledgling program in England. He recently visited Venezuela for a firsthand look at Abreu’s work. “In all honesty, there has been so much furor about El Sistema in the musical world that I was prepared to be disappointed,” Lloyd-Webber recently wrote for the Telegraph. “Instead, I returned convinced that, alongside the huge additional benefit of harnessing the power of music to improve social cohesion, I had seen the template for music education in the 21st century.”

It’s hard to argue with the results of The System. In Britain, after just one year of implementation in poor communities, educators have noticed remarkable changes. “Teachers are reporting hugely increased levels of concentration, discipline, motivation and attendance,” Lloyd-Webber wrote. In Venezuela, where the program has a much longer track record, there have been noticeable declines in crime and drug use wherever The System is in place.

What, then, is the secret to El Sistema’s success? There’s certainly more to it than learning to play an instrument. At the same time, there is a beautiful simplicity to the program’s formula.

One thing that stands out in The System is how much discipline and hard work it adds to the child’s education. “Every day after school throughout Venezuela, you can see kids practicing,” reporter Bob Simon said in the 60 Minutes piece my daughter watched with her violin instructor (watch the video here). “Fifteen thousand trained musicians work with them. But The System also uses gifted kids to teach other kids. On top of eight hours of schoolwork, it makes for a long day.”

It amounts to about 11 hours of schoolwork and music training every day, six days a week. It’s a grueling pace for any youngster to maintain, but a no-brainer choice when you consider the alternative: hopelessness, disorder, delinquency and violence in the slum.

Another wonderful benefit of The System is its family-oriented environment. “El Sistema is a huge family,” says Abreu’s protégé, Gustavo Dudamel—one of the most celebrated young conductors in the world. At the head of The System is the father figure—“maestro Jose Antonio Abreu. He dedicated his life to us,” Dudamel says.

Parental involvement also plays a significant role. Teachers make house calls to inform parents about what the program expects of its students. The government provides a small stipend for families of El Sistema students, which helps encourage parents and children to stick with it. But more than any financial incentive the program provides, it is the results that encourage parental support.

When families saw how The System helped keep their children off the streets, Abreu says, “they became our most important allies.”

Nothing complicated so far. Children need discipline and structure in their education. They need support from involved parents at home.

And, Abreu believes, they need music. Not the popular noise that masquerades as music in popular culture. Real music—music that feeds the mind, uplifts the human spirit, builds confidence and inspires achievement.

Popular music won’t work, one El Sistema teacher told 60 Minutes. Children can get that anywhere, even at home in the slum. But “when they sit in one of these chairs in the orchestra, they think they’re in another country, in another planet, and they start changing” (emphasis mine throughout).

They change not because they dream of being the next Gustavo Dudamel. Most of them won’t even become professional musicians. They change because the music will remain part of them forever, Abreu says. This is why The System puts less emphasis on the individual soloist and focuses more on the music, unlike many other music programs.

In The System, music is larger than the musician.

“People refer to this talking only of material wealth, leaving aside the spiritual patrimony of humanity, within which art takes a very important place,” Abreu told the Globe and Mail last year. “My struggle is for a society in which art is something more than just an aesthetic dimension of life. It is a primary instrument for the development of the individual and of the people.”

Using beautiful music as an instrument to educate and train young people for a brighter tomorrow. It’s a model that is as beautiful as it is simple.

We use it at Herbert W. Armstrong College and Imperial Academy. (For more about our many musical programs, go here, here and here.)

Our father figure was Herbert W. Armstrong, an amateur musician with a maestro-like genius for using God-inspired music to disseminate God’s truth while educating the young. “Music is another study we want to teach at Ambassador,” Mr. Armstrong wrote several months before he opened the college in 1947—“for music has an important place in evangelistic work.”

It was a system rooted in the foundation of God’s Word. Wholesome and uplifting music has always played an instrumental role in the work of God’s ministry and the education of our young. Colossians 3:16 tells us to teach using psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. 1 Chronicles 25:1 even describes the role musical instruments have in prophesying!

And did you know that in ancient Israel, there were a number of priests whose sole responsibility was to make musicto honor and praise God? (See 1 Chronicles 9:33.)

God is the author of beautiful music. He’s always intended for it to be used as an instrument to bring human beings into His Family!

That’s why the 60 Minutes segment on Abreu was so inspiring. True, it’s not God’s system. But it does reveal how much one visionary can do to improve the quality of life for many people by using a simple, family-oriented system of education that revolves around fine music.

Now think of the wonderful abundance, the beautiful peace and prosperity that will soon spread over all the Earth once God’s government is established in Jerusalem and His system of reeducating the world is finally in place.

Will music play an instrumental role in God’s system of education? You know it will!

As prophesied in hundreds of Bible passages, the dawn of that beautiful new civilization—fittingly signaled by a thunderous blast from a musical instrument—is almost here.