Many people believe that teaching children music makes them smarter, better able to learn new things. Researchers, however, have found that there’s one thing musical training does not do. They say it does not make children more intelligent.

Samuel Mehr is a graduate student at Harvard’s School of Education. He said it is wrong to think that learning to play a musical instrument improves a child’s intellectual development. He says the evidence comes from studies that measured the mental ability of two groups of 4-year-olds and their parents. One group attended music class, the other went to a class that places importance on the visual arts — arts that can be seen. “The evidence there is ‘no.’ We found no evidence for any advantage on any of these tests for the kids taking part in these music classes,” said Mehr.

Samuel Mehr says researchers have carried out many studies in an effort to learn whether musical training can make children smarter. He says the results have been mixed. He says only one study seems to show a small percentage increase in IQ, intellectual scores among students after one year of music lessons. He does not believe that IQ is a good measure of a child’s intelligence. He says researchers in his study compared how well children in the musical training group did on mental processing tasks or projects, then the results were compared to those of children who did not take lessons. There was no evidence that the musical training group did much better on the mental tasks than the other group. The researchers confirmed the results with a larger group of children and their parents.

Mr Mehr says music lessons may not offer children a fast easy way to gain entry to the best schools later of their life. But he says the training is still important for cultural reasons. In his words, “We teach music because music is important for us.”

He notes that the works of writer William Shakespeare are not taught, so the children will do better in physics. He says Shakespeare is taught because it is important. “And I don’t think music needs to be any different than that.”

In the last few years, “bike­sharing” companies like oBike, ofo, and Mobike began flooding (挤满) streets in places like China, Japan, Australia, and Singapore with bikes. But it didn’t take long before there were too many companies and too many bikes on the streets. Soon many companies went out of business, leaving behind thousands of unused rental bikes. Many of them were completely new.

Businessman Mike Than Tun Win realized that though these bikes didn’t have any value where they were, they could do a lot of good for schoolchildren in Myanmar. Some children in Myanmar travel an hour or more on foot every day to get to school. Soon, Mr. Than Tun Win had raised around $400,000 for the LessWalk project. About half of the money was his own, and the other half was given by companies.

The LessWalk project bought thousands of new rental bikes from failed companies and shipped them to Myanmar. Once in Myanmar, the bikes are changed to make them more useful for students. The rental bikes used to require a smartphone app to unlock them. LessWalk changed this for a lock with a key. They also added a second place to sit at the back of the bikes, allowing two children to ride to school on one bike. Recently they’ve added another change — they’re using special tires that don’t go flat to take the place of the bike’s regular tires. With all the changes, Mr. Than says each bike costs LessWalk about $35.

Giving out the bikes takes a little longer, since LessWalk wants to make sure that the bikes go to the students who need them the most. The project is working with Myanmar’s government and schools to focus on poor students who walk close to two hours a day to school.

Though LessWalk only began in March, the project has already brought around 22,500 bikes into Myanmar and has given out over 1,000 bikes. Mr. Than Tun Win hopes to bring in as many as 100,000 bikes and expand the program to Laos and Cambodia.