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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.
T
he 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).
Yale
University
Press. Available from NAEA Publications. NAEA grants reprint permission for
this excerpt from Ten Lessons
with proper acknowledgment
of its source and NAEA.
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