When students and parents are asked to rate subjects according to their importance, the arts are unavoidably at the bottom of the list. Music is nice, people seem to say, but not important. Too often it is viewed as mere entertainment, but certainly not an education priority（优先）. This view is shortsighted. In fact, music education is beneficial and important for all students.
Music tells us who we are. Because music is an expression of the beings who create it, it reflects their thinking and values and the social environment it came from. Rock music represents a lifestyle just as surely as does a Schubert song. The jazz influence that George Gershwin and other musicians introduced into their music is obviously American because it came from American musical traditions. Music expresses our character and values. It gives us identity as a society.
Music provides a kind of perception（感知）that cannot be acquired any other way. Science can explain how the sun rises and sets. The arts explore the emotive meaning of the same phenomenon. We need every possible way to discover and respond to our world for one simple but powerful reason: No one way can get it all.
The arts are forms of thoughts as powerful in what they communicate as mathematical and scientific symbols. They are ways we human beings “talk” to each other. They are the language of civilization through which we express our fears, our curiosities, our discoveries, our hopes. The arts are ways we give form to our ideas and imagination so that they can be shared with others. When we do not give children access to an important way of expressing themselves such as music, we take away from them the meanings that music expresses.
Science and technology do not tell us what it means to be human. The arts do. Music is an important way we express human suffering, celebration, the meaning and value of peace and love.
So music education is far more necessary than people seem to realize.
24. According to Paragraph 1, students _______.
A. disagree with their parents on education
B. regard music as a way of entertainment
C. view music as an overlooked subject
D. prefer the arts to science
25. In Paragraph 2, the author uses jazz as an example to _______.
A. compare it with rock music B. introduce American musical traditions
C. show music identifies a society D. prove music influences people’s lifestyles
26. According to the passage, the arts and science _______.
A .approach the world from different angles
B. explore different phenomena of the world
C. express people’s feelings in different ways
D .explain what it means to be human differently
27. What is the main idea of the passage?
A. Music is an effective communication tool.
B. Music should be of top education priority.
C. Music makes students more imaginative
D. Music education deserves more attention.