It's time to face the music. It is not mere coincidence that the cultures which cultivated such giants as Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Shubert, Bach, Vivaldi, Caruso and Verdi also produced Fermi, da Vinci, Michelangelo, Virgil, Galileo, Marconi, Dante, Einstein, Kant, Freud and Martin Luther.

I have had the good fortune to visit some of the most progressive research and development labs in the world - IBM, General Electric, MIT, AT&T, NASA, Rockwell and Boeing - and they all had two things in common, utter cleanliness and piped-in classical music - music to think by.

Children's morals torn to shreds

Our children's morals are being torn to shreds while their brains are being scrambled by this hootnanny disguised as music that promotes sex and violence and is definitely not conducive to creative thinking.

As they listen to the radio or watch the television, their brains are being pulverised. They go to bed at nights with earphones from a boom box or the cellphone making the final kill intravenous. There is no let up on the way to school in the taxi or the bus; when they arrive at the classroom, their brains are jittery, tired and listless. Day in and day out they are bombarded until they become addicted; the long-term effects on the brain are much the same as that of marijuana on addicts.

Consequently, we are no longer able to produce capable leaders. The bright, resourceful ones will forge ahead and even acquire a degree but the brain is irreversibly scrambled and incapable of creative thinking. They will, quite likely, find a place in the Government as a member of parliament or at places like the Bank of Jamaica or the Planning Institute of Jamaica and the nation will suffer the consequences, then we'll wonder why we are in such a quandary?

I am, etc.,

GERALD A. HEDMANN

St Thomas