Music education and programs within the United States  Music education in the United States is implemented in many schools as a form of modern day teaching. Music education is a field of study that focuses on the teaching and application of music in the classroom. As this addition to the curriculum progresses, the effects and implications to this course of study are being widely debated, especially the factors pertaining to. Researchers are able to follow its progression from its earliest known application within the field of academics. The earliest systematic music education in the country was centered on the training of singers for Protestant church services, to lead the congregation in psalm-singing. In the 18th century, the first singing schools in the country were founded, and a number of legendary traveling singing masters traveled New England, teaching in barns, schoolhouses and other informal locations; these masters included Francis Hopkinson and William Billings. By the end of the century, more formal singing schools in cities like Savannah, Philadelphia and Boston became social singing societies. Public education in the United States first offered music as part of the curriculum in Boston in the 1830s, and it spread through the help of singing teacher Lowell Mason, after he successfully advocated it to the Boston School Committee in 1838. The committee ultimately decided to include music as a curricular subject because it was of a moral, physical, and intellectual nature. Music was considered moral because it played such a part in religion, as well as the fact that it had been documented to produce "happiness, contentment, cheerfulness, and tranquility." It was of a physical nature because singing was exercise for the lungs. The committee justified music's intellectual nature by stating that it had been studied as a part of the quadrivium in the Middle Ages, and that it "contributes to memory, comparison, attention, and intellectual faculties." Another advocate of music in public education was Swiss educational reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. Pestalozzi believed that nature was the ultimate and original source of knowledge, therefore his educational theories placed a high value on sensory, kinesthetic, and active learning. He felt students should start with simple concepts in all subjects and move later to more complex ideas. Pestalozzi's method was one of the earliest methods that could be considered "student-centered learning" and his ideas of discipline and a student-teacher rapport based on love and trust were markedly different from the common practice of corporal punishment at the time. The first music educator to use Pestalozzian ideas in teaching music was Hans Negeli, a colleague of Pestalozzi in Switzerland.