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. 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.
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.
