In this article Leon Mones expresses his deep interest in the functional role of music in Western culture and particularly in the system of public education that has been designed to assure the survival and advancement of Western culture and the people who will live within it. In other words, he is interested in music as a dynamic experience in the lives of people, the structure of their individual personalities, and the pattern of the democratic culture in which they choose to live. In this article he aims to discuss not so much the essential qualities of music as a structured science and art, but the internal and external effects of music on human beings. He asserts that teachers of music need, somehow, to find ways of relating music to the emotional, intellectual and personality growth of their pupils. They must make music condition their feelings and their taste. They must seek to make music play a tranquilizing and maturing effect in forming their personalities. They must seek, even while they are engaged in the transient activities of their lives, to help them capture the rapture of eternity, achievable through music, even for fleeting seconds. They must help others to make of music more than a minute's intoxication or an hour's hysterical escape from fear, frustration or futility. With these goals in mind, Mones provides 12 principles he believes should be basic to a program of music education.