Ten Lessons the Arts Teach

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The Arts Curriculum in the School

"The function of a school is not to help kids do well in school."

"The function of a school is to help kids do well in life."

Elliott Eisner

“The arts should serve as a model for the rest of education,” said Dr. Elliott Eisner, a professor of art and the Lee Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford University. “In place of the current pressures of eliminating art from education–or, if that’s not possible, the emphasis upon making art education completely conform to the rest of the curriculum–history, English, math, sciences, and all other subjects should be taught as art-forms.”

"One of the first things that work as the arts develop is a sense of relationship, that nothing stands alone....every aspect of the work affects every other aspect....the arts teach the ability to engage the imagination as a source of content....they are among the most powerful ways we become human, and that is reason enough to earn them a place in our schools."
Elliot Eisner, January 30, 1997 Christian Science Monitor

Elliott Eisner, a Professor of Education at Stanford University has identified 10 lessons which are clarified through the study of Art in the schools. We in the ARTS Center support these ideas, and seek to incorporate them in all of our presentations.

Ten Lessons the Arts Teach

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 willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.
The arts make vivid the fact that words do not, in their literal form or 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.

Elliott Eisner, in Beyond Creating: The Place for Art in America's Schools. Getty Center for Education in the Arts. 1985 p. 69.