Ten Lessons the Arts Teach by Elliot Eisner
- The arts teach children to make good judgements about qualitative relationships...judgment rather than rules 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...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 circumstances and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and 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 teach students to think through and within the material. All art forms employ some means through which images become real
- The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said.
- The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source and through 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.