Comment by chickensong

There is more to life than earning money, and not all skills need to be in service of that.

Regardless, both of those talents have the potential to open doors and set the stage for opportunity, nor are they mutually exclusive to whatever economic skills might be viable in the future.

People should prepare their kids to be happy adults, not just employed adults.

I recall reading of studies that found that a significant majority of adults who did not learn to play an instrument when they were young wish that they had.

Only a small minority of adults who did learn to play an instrument when young wish that they hadn't.

If you can read and have any sort of curiosity (or you help teach curiosity) it’s a pretty solid foundation to learn just about anything.

The music bit is mostly things you’d want to impart on your kids if you care about that sort of thing. (Which I do!) The public versions of it are not great where I am but individually you can do a lot.

Proficiency in reading and writing is clearly useful.

Proficiency in musical instrumemts is not necessarily useful by itself, but it's a path towards mastery of something hard that typically involves a lot of intentional practice. Having been able to master something hard once makes it easier to master other hard things, because you can reuse the learning skills. Music has a little bit of applied fractions and what not, too.

The same thing learning to learn journey happens with learning a second language. But also, learning a second language helps develop skills and understanding of your first language, and helps develop communication skills for situations where there's a limited mutual understandable vocabulary.

Some languages have market value too. Better communication with employers, customers, and suppliers is valuable.

Self-expression is a fundamental human need. Ignore to your own detriment.

> Not many people get paid for musical or linguistic talents, actually.

And yet the highest earning people I know who didn’t come from affluent backgrounds are musically and linguistically talented.

Focusing on what the market demands is chasing a moving target and if you miss the boat you might just end up a low-level peon holding a wrench.

Maybe it comes down to whether you advocate for live-to-work or work-to-live.

Music and linguistics have often been considered amongst the "liberal arts" - none of which are arguably "useful" but all of which are terribly worthwhile.

Reading is a life skill. Proficiency in it makes you understand things. Weren't there plenty of news articles this year about how high schoolers didn't have proficient reading capabilities? Maybe teaching your kids how to properly read a text is a good thing.

> "Passion" is a luxury. We all have to choose from what the market demands.

See it that way, having a normal social life requires other skills than your job.

There won’t be a labor market any more, unless there’s some technological barrier for AIs and robots that has not appeared yet.

It’s either some form of socialism or mass starvation.