The Venezuelan and classical music

How could poor societies uplift their citizens? What action could this country take to safeguard the next generation against the numbing effects of poverty?

The rise of India, China and our own neighbouring Brazil has seen the lifting of nearly a billion people out of gross poverty.

Bangladesh, one of the poorest societies in the world, saw the emergence of Muhammad Yunus as a billionaire after founding the Grameen Bank. This Bank aided millions of Asia’s poor to climb out of the trap of poverty.

Poverty stifles and chokes the energy out of a human being. But one visionary person could make a huge difference to transform people’s lives.

As the Industrial Age grinds to its end as the Technology Age gains steam, the world works hard to eradicate gross poverty. The United Nations works a plan called the Millennial Goals to make this happen.

But the world’s visionary leaders know that money and economics alone cannot solve the global poverty problem. Poverty is a social disease that afflicts a society with painful deformities and paralysing distortions.

The Grameen Bank’s success story saw how a few dollars in loans to poor rural folks could aid families in escaping the jaws of poverty.

A greater story has emerged in neighbouring Venezuela, where a senior citizen, economist, Dr. José Antonio Abreu, transforms the lives of over a million poverty-stricken children across Latin America.

How did this quiet professor transform the lives of over a million poor kids across the whole continent? He simply got them interested in playing classical music.
The world now trumpets Dr Abreu’s success, with the US cable network CBS airing a comprehensive documentary on his social transformation. In Canada, the national radio, CBC, aired a documentary about this amazing social miracle story.

People call the classical music programme simply ‘El Sistema’.

The CBS website about the 2008 documentary said the following about the astonishing impact of El Sistema (see http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/04/11/60minutes/main4009335.shtml):

What comes to mind when you mention Venezuela? Hugo Chavez probably, or oil, or baseball? What probably does not come to mind is classical music.

And yet, Venezuela is the home of a music program that’s so extraordinary it has been hailed as the future of classical music itself.

As correspondent Bob Simon first reported in April, 2008, it’s called “el Sistema” – “the system” – and it’s all about children, about saving them – hundreds of thousands of children – through music. In the world of classical music, the Simon Bolivar National Youth Orchestra is unique. The musicians, kids mainly, are not graduates of some conservatory or music school – they’re alumni of the school of hard knocks in the slums of Venezuela. And their orchestra is about the exuberance of youth.

It recently made its Carnegie Hall debut with Gustavo Dudamel, its celebrated young conductor.

Many of the kids come from neighbourhoods which are so poor, desperate and crime-ridden, that hope is often extinguished in children at an early age.

Instead, these kids travel the world, playing to sell-out audiences. The National Youth Orchestra and hundreds of others are the brainchild of Dr. José Antonio Abreu.

Asked if he remembers the night he first started, Dr. Abreu, told Simon through a translator, “We only had 11 children – rehearsing in cramped conditions. But I had the feeling that this was the beginning of something very big.”

Abreu, a 69-year-old retired economist, trained musician, and social reformer founded “the system” in 1975 and has built it with religious zeal, based on his unorthodox belief that what poor Venezuelan kids needed was classical music.

“Essentially this is a social system that fights poverty,” Abreu explained. “A child’s physical poverty is overcome by the spiritual richness that music provides.”

“So, music actually becomes the vehicle for social change?” Simon asked.

“Without a doubt,” Abreu replied. “And that is what’s happening in Venezuela.”

Such is the extraordinary impact of one man with a passion to make a difference in the lives of poor children in his country, right next door to us. His work has now spread across Latin America, and has become a study worldwide for social engineers to learn how to reduce poverty.

In the US, the Freedom Writers Foundation sees similar miracle results in inner cities where crime and social dysfunction dog families into generational poverty.

Erin Gruwell founded the Foundation after her astonishing success with a group of students who were deemed a ‘write-off’ as just bad kids.

A book and a movie called ‘Freedom Writers’ tell the inspiring story of her social transformation through the act of teaching literary writing to children suffering poverty and social dysfunction.
In 1994, Gruwell started teaching in Room 203 at the Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach, California.

Refusing to believe that her students were “unteachable”, Gruwell believed in them, and put her heart and soul into the task of transforming their lives.

The Freedom Writers Foundation website tells the story:

When Erin Gruwell was challenged by a room of students considered to be “unteachable,” Gruwell adapted her curriculum to engage her students and encourage them to rethink rigid beliefs about themselves and others. By using relevant literature and fund raising to bring in speakers and take her students on field trips, Gruwell convinced her at-risk students to reconsider the impact of their daily decisions and to take ownership of their futures. With her steadfast support, her students shattered stereotypes to become high school graduates, critical thinkers, aspiring college students and citizens for change.

Since the publication of The New York Times bestseller ‘The Freedom Writers Diary’ in 1999 – featuring the real-life journal entries by the original students of Room 203 – the Freedom Writers Foundation has distributed one million copies of ‘The Freedom Writers Diary’.

These two stories prove the power of the humanities to impact young minds.

Using classical music and literary writing and literature, Dr Abreu in poor Venezuela and Gruwell in poor inner city America show that our own society could leap ahead to escape the gross poverty that afflicts 43 percent of our nation, and trap nearly half the nation in a bottomless pit.

It takes one person believing and committing to the task.