[Nurses] are the first people the child will hear, theirs are the words he will try to copy and pronounce. We naturally retain most tenaciously what we learned when our minds were fresh: a flavour lasts a long time when the jar that absorbs it is new, and the dyes that change wool’s pristine whiteness cannot be washed out. Indeed, the worse these impressions are, the most persistent they are. Good is easily changed to worse: can you ever hope to change bad to good? So do not let the child become accustomed, even in infancy, to a type of speech which he will have to unlearn. (Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 1.1)

Kodaly’s five principles of child education are that

• everyone has the right to musical literacy,
• the child’s natural instrument for learning music in the early years is the voice,
• in order for children to really become literate, they must start very young,
• the natural sort of music to use is the folk music of the child’s culture, just like the natural language for him to learn is the language of his people,
• and only music of unquestioned quality ought to be used in educating children.

I’m not going to defend those here, besides my quotation from Quintilian, which I think is quite persuasive. It’s just that Wee-Sing is (to the best of my limited knowledge) some of the better stuff that America has to offer for children’s music, so I’m interested in comparing Wee-Sing to the most successful program in children’s education to date.

As for everyone’s right to musical literacy, it’s more or less irrelevant. Wee-Sing is for any child, so way to go on that score. And, in fact, on three of the four other points, Wee-Sing is really much better than much of its competition in the market: (1) it encourages, more or less, the child to use his voice rather than just to bang on percussive instruments like many other annoying and primitive music programs for children; (2) Wee-Sing is geared toward the youngest constituency so that my 13-month-old nephew can recognize his favorite songs; (3) and, of course, the music is in our own tongue. That last point may seem odd, but Kodaly’s point is more nuanced. It’s a discussion for another time.

The final point—only music of unquestioned quality ought to be used in educating children—is where, obviously, I don’t think Wee-Sing gets it. To the best of my knowledge, Wee-Sing may be the best we have, and it’s far better to get a surmountably mediocre education than to get none at all, which is insurmountable. As I pointed out, Wee-Sing gets a lot of other stuff right. But its music is definitely not of unquestionable quality. There are several levels to this: (1) the actual choice of tunes and songs, (2) the arrangements of those tunes, and (3) the performance. My problems is really with (3). I actually find the arrangements amusing and pedagogical. I think (1) is worrying sometimes: Wee-Sing tends to the accessible song, the “fun” song rather than the song of quality. I sometimes think that the music is more for the sake of the parent than the child, because there’s nothing quite so gratifying as getting a smile on the face of your infant when you clap, clap, clap your hands as fast as you can. That may be a great song pedagogically, but just because the song gets the kid to laugh doesn’t mean it’s helping his education. Talking gibberish and being uncivilized will always make a kid laugh, and sometimes that’s fine, but the kid’s always learning, so if that’s all you’re doing, you’re giving him a nasty education.

Anyway. About (3), the performance. The real problem with Wee-Sing is that the children whom they’ve recorded to sing all their songs purposefully sing (or were purposefully taught to sing) “like children”. Their elocution can be sloppy and childish, the quality of their voices is not exemplary but just average, their intonation is usually good, but occasionally atrocious. Hopefully it goes without saying that the child won’t positively notice this, in that he won’t think, “They’re not really up to snuff.” The far more worrying thing is that the child will learn from what they’re listening to what is up to snuff. That will be their standard for good performance. The quality of your voice when you sing can be lazy, and your speech too, because that’s what it means to be a child and sing. I’m not sure if parents have noticed this, but I’ve always noticed that toddlers are far more embarrassed to sing Wee-Sing than the parents are, and if I remember my own emotions correctly, it’s because I felt as if I was being encouraged to act decidedly differently from the way parents did. Kids who grow up listening to mediocre performances as a standard will grow up to be parents who are comfortable letting their children listen to mediocre performances.

So, the alternative…well, I don’t know if it exists, but it ought to. Kodaly thought that the greatest effort in training a musician ought not to be put into the concert pianist or the conductor or any kind of performer, but into the teacher and particularly the teacher of the small child. A student, when he is mature, is like his master. Kodaly knew that you’re never going to exceed the level of your teacher, and when you have a “those who can’t do teach” attitude about music, it will be the rare student, not the average student, to be musically literate. To account for this minority, you’ll come up with silly ideas, like “musical genius”. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Kids soak up everything, and in this case, we ought to think of Wee-Sing as our children’s nurse. It’s teaching them all sorts of things about the standards of music, and in the performance area, they aren’t good things. A kid will probably not respond as well to Bach as he will to Three Blind Mice, and that’s fine, but he won’t respond better to badly-sung Three Blind Mice. I think it will make him more bashful about music.

All of which, I guess, to say, be cautious of Wee-Sing, if only for the reason that no age is more formative in standards. I enjoin somebody to re-make Wee-Sing with all its best folk tunes and do it with children who sing in an exemplary way.