Ten Lessons the Arts Teach By Elliot Eisner
1.The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships.
2. Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is
judgment rather than rules that prevail.
3. The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions
can have more than one answer.
4. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons is that there are
many ways to see and interpret the world.
5. 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.
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 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.
1.The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships.
2. Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is
judgment rather than rules that prevail.
3. The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions
can have more than one answer.
4. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons is that there are
many ways to see and interpret the world.
5. 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.
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 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.