10+LESSONS+THE+ARTS+TEACH

By Elliot 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 numbers 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.** <span style="color: #800000; font-family: Georgia,serif;"> 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. <span style="color: #800000; font-family: Georgia,serif;"> **9. The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source** <span style="color: #800000; font-family: Georgia,serif;"> and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling. <span style="color: #800000; font-family: Georgia,serif;"> **10. The arts' position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young** <span style="color: #800000; font-family: Georgia,serif;"> **what adults believe is important.**

<span style="color: #800000; font-family: Georgia,serif;"> 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.