"It's half in tab, half in music..."

I was walking back home from school one night when I passed 2 guys playing guitars outside on their porch. They stopped the song they were on, and one guy started teaching the other guy a new song. He said that "it was hard to learn, because it was in half tab and half music."

For those of you not familiar with the guitar-playing world, "tab" is short for "tablature", which is a form of writing down how to play guitar chords as a series of numbers and lines, where your fingers stand for each number 1-4 and they form the shapes on the guitar "grid." This came about as an easy way to teach people guitar on the internet, where actually creating a musical score can be very hard.

The issue here is that many kids today learn the guitar by only reading tab. They never learn how to read music at all, and only see the chords as numbers on a grid. Because of this, many guitarists lack the music theory training that is essential to be a great guitarist.

Which brings me to my question: With more and more kids deciding to only read tab and never take actual musical lessons, will the quality and complexity of guitar music go down in the future? Who's fault is this? Is it the kid's fault for being lazy? Or is it the parents' fault for not teaching the importance of reading musical notes? Also, will there be less and less kids playing other musical instruments besides the guitar because they only took the time to learn guitar tab instead of musical notes, which is not transferable to other instruments?

How can we stop this from happening? First off, parents, teach the importance of music theory at a very young age. Secondly, petition your local school to make sure that music classes are not further de-emphasized in this age of focus on only math, science, and arithmetic.

In fifteen years, if our kids only know math, science, and arithmetic, and they aren't cultured in music, it will be a very sad time to live in.