Ten Lessons The Art Teach
by Eliot Eisner
1. 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.
2. The arts teach
children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can
have more than one answer.
3. The arts celebrate
multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons is that there are many ways
to see and interpret the world.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. The arts teach
students that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic in
subtleties.
7. The arts teach
students to think through and within a material. All art forms employ some means through which
images become real.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. The arts’ position in
the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important.