• "He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist"

     
    St Francis of Assisi
     
     

    “I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”

     

    Albert Einstein
     
     

    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). 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.

     

     
Last Modified on September 16, 2021