Ten Lessons the Arts
Teach
By Elliot Eisner
·
The arts teach children to make good
judgments about qualitative relationships.
Unlike much of
the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it
is
judgment rather than rules that prevail.
·
The
arts teach children that problems can have more than one
solution
and that
questions can have more than one answer.
·
The arts celebrate multiple
perspectives.
One of their
large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the
world.
·
The arts teach children that in complex
forms of problem solving
purposes are
seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts
requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated
possibilities of the work as it unfolds.
·
The arts make vivid the fact that neither
words in their literal form nor number exhaust what we can know.
The limits of our language do not define the limits of our
cognition.
·
The arts teach students that small
differences can have large effects.
The arts
traffic in subtleties.
·
The arts teach students to think through
and within a material.
All art forms
employ some means through which images become real.
·
The arts help children learn to say what
cannot be said.
When children
are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into
their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the
job.
·
The arts enable us to have experience we
can have from no other source
and through
such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of
feeling.
·
The arts’ position in the school
curriculum symbolizes to the young
what adults
believe is important.
SOURCE:
Eisner, E. (2002). The Arts and the
Creation of Mind, In Chapter 4, What the Arts Teach and How It
Shows. (pp. 70-92).