Bright Future Academy Charter School

After School Programming Principals

By David Suarez
Director of After School Programming
Director of Arts Education

In collaboration with Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s philosophy.

As part of our school mission and vision of educating the whole child, the following 8 principles are
the core of the afterschool program.

1. Put the power in the hands of the students.

2. Encourage individual responsibility for student’s product and quality
3. Create clarity of roles for the students participation in groups
4. Foster horizontal teamwork among students and groups
5. Share and rotate leadership in sessions
6. Learn to listen, learn to talk for both students and staff
7. Seek consensus (and build creative systems that favor consensus) among each other and in
groups.
8. Dedicate Passionately to your mission

Our after school program includes:

 Music
 Visual Art
 Tutoring
 Physical Education
 Edu Garden (fully realized garden where students learn from seed to table about healthy
foods)

These principals, create an open source foundation that allows for the El Sistema’s philosophy a
flexible model for social change, to fully realize and manifest into the lives of our students. (please see
attached transcripts from Dr. Abreu’s Ted Talk )

Transcripts:
Jose Antonio Abreu: My dear friends, ladies and gentlemen, I am overjoyed today at being awarded the TED Prize on behalf of all the
distinguished music teachers, artists and educators from Venezuela who have selflessly and loyally accompanied me for 35 years in
founding, growing and developing in Venezuela the National System of Youth and Children’s Orchestras and Choirs.

Since I was a boy, in my early childhood, I always wanted to be a musician, and, thank God, I made it. From my teachers, my family
and my community, I had all the necessary support to become a musician. All my life I’ve dreamed that all Venezuelan children have
the same opportunity that I had. From that desire and from my heart stemmed the idea to make music a deep and global reality for my
country.

From the very first rehearsal, I saw the bright future ahead. The rehearsal meant a great challenge to me. I had received a donation of
50 music stands to be used by 100 boys in that rehearsal. When I arrived at the rehearsal, only 11 kids had shown up, and I said to
myself, “Do I close the program or multiply these kids?” I decided to face the challenge, and on that same night, I promised those 11
children I’d turn our orchestra into one of the leading orchestras in the world. Two months ago, I remembered that promise I made,
when a distinguished English critic published an article in the London Times, asking who could be the winner of the Orchestra World
Cup.

He mentioned four great world orchestras, and the fifth one was Venezuela’s Youth Symphony Orchestra. Today we can say that art
in Latin America is no longer a monopoly of elites and that it has become a social right, a right for all the people.

Child: There is no difference here between classes, nor white or black, if you have money or not. Simply, if you are talented, if you
have the vocation and the will to be here you get in, you share with us and make music.

During the recent tour by the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela of U.S. and Europe we saw how our music moved young
audiences to the bottom of their souls, how children and adolescents rushed up to the stage to receive the jackets from our musicians,
how the standing ovations, sometimes 30 minutes long, seemed to last forever, and how the public, after the concert was over, went
out into the street to greet our young people in triumph.

This meant not only an artistic triumph, but also a profound emotional sympathy between the public of the most advanced nations of
the world and the musical youth of Latin America, as seen in Venezuela, giving these audiences a message of music, vitality, energy,
enthusiasm and strength.

In its essence, the orchestra and the choir are much more than artistic structures. They are examples and schools of social life, because
to sing and to play together means to intimately coexist toward perfection and excellence, following a strict discipline of organization
and coordination in order to seek the harmonic interdependence of voices and instruments. That’s how they build a spirit of solidarity
and fraternity among them, develop their self-esteem and foster the ethical and aesthetical values related to the music in all its senses.
This is why music is immensely important in the awakening of sensibility, in the forging of values and in the training of youngsters to
teach other kids.

Child: After all this time here, music is life. Nothing else. Music is life.

JA: Each teenager and child in El Sistema has his own story, and they are all important and of great significance to me. Let me
mention the case of Edicson Ruiz. He is a boy from a parish in Caracas who passionately attended to his double bass lessons at the San
Agustin’s Junior Orchestra. With his effort, and the support of his mother, his family and his community, he became a principal
member in the double bass segment of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. We have another well-known case — Gustavo Dudamel.
He started as a boy member of the children’s orchestra in his hometown, Barquisimeto. There, he grew as a violinist and as a
conductor. He became the conductor of Venezuela’s junior orchestras, and today conducts the world’s greatest orchestras. He is the
musical director of Los Angeles Philharmonic, and is still the overall leader of Venezuela’s junior orchestras. He was the conductor of
the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, and he’s an unbeatable example for young musicians in Latin America and the world.

The structure of El Sistema is based on a new and flexible managing style adapted to the features of each community and region, and
today attends to 300,000 children of the lower and middle class all over Venezuela. It’s a program of social rescue and deep cultural
transformation designed to the whole Venezuelan society with absolutely no distinctions whatsoever, but emphasizing on the
vulnerable and endangered social groups.

The effect of El Sistema is felt in three fundamental circles — in the personal/social circle, in the family circle and in the community.
In the personal/social circle, the children in the orchestras and choirs develop their intellectual and emotional side. The music becomes
a source for developing the dimensions of the human being, thus elevating the spirit and leading man to a full development of his
personality. So, the emotional and intellectual profits are huge — the acquisition of leadership, teaching and training principles, the
sense of commitment, responsibility, generosity and dedication to others, and the individual contribution to achieve great collective
goals. All this leads to the development of self-esteem and confidence.
Mother Teresa of Calcutta insisted on something that always impressed me — the most miserable and tragic thing about poverty is not
the lack of bread or roof, but the feeling of being no-one, the feeling of not being anyone, the lack of identification, the lack of public
esteem.

That’s why the child’s development in the orchestra and the choir provides him with a noble identity and makes him a role model for
his family and community. It makes him a better student at school because it inspires in him a sense of responsibility, perseverance
and punctuality that will greatly help him at school.

Within the family, the parents’ support is unconditional. The child becomes a role model for both his parents, and this is very
important for a poor child. Once the child discovers he is important for his family, he begins to seek new ways of improving himself
and hopes better for himself and his community. Also, he hopes for social and economic improvements for his own family. All this
makes up a constructive and ascending social dynamic. The large majority of our children belong, as I already mentioned, to the most
vulnerable strata of the Venezuelan population. That encourages them to embrace new dreams, new goals, and progress in the various
opportunities that music has to offer.

Finally, in the circle of the community, the orchestras prove to be the creative spaces of culture and sources of exchange and new
meanings. The spontaneity music has excludes it as a luxury item and makes it a patrimony of society. It’s what makes a child play a
violin at home, while his father works in his carpentry. It’s what makes a little girl play the clarinet at home, while her mother does the
housework. The idea is that the families join with pride and joy in the activities of the orchestras and the choirs their children belong
to. The huge spiritual world that music produces in itself, which also lies within itself, ends up overcoming material poverty. From the
minute a child’s taught how to play an instrument, he’s no longer poor. He becomes a child in progress heading for a professional
level, who’ll later become a full citizen. Needless to say that music is the number one prevention against prostitution, violence, bad
habits, and everything degrading in the life of a child.
A few years ago, historian Arnold Toynbee said that the world was suffering a huge spiritual crisis. Not an economic or social crisis,
but a spiritual one. I believe that to confront such a crisis, only art and religion can give proper answers to humanity, to mankind’s
deepest aspirations, and to the historic demands of our times. Education being the synthesis of wisdom and knowledge, it’s the means
to strive for a more perfect, more aware more noble and more just society.
With passion and enthusiasm we pay profound respects to TED for its outstanding humanism, the scope of its principles, for its open
and generous promotion of young values. We hope that TED can contribute in a full and fundamental way to the building of this new
era in the teaching of music, in which the social, communal, spiritual and vindicatory aims of the child and the adolescent become a
beacon and a goal for a vast social mission. No longer putting society at the service of art, and much less at the services of monopolies
of the elite, but instead art at the service of society, at the service of the weakest, at the service of the children, at the service of the
sick, at the service of the vulnerable, and at the service of all those who cry for vindication through the spirit of their human condition
and the raising up of their dignity.