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The Arts Curriculum in the School
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"The function of a school is not to help kids do well
in school." |
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"The function of a school is to help kids do well in
life." |
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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
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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.
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The arts teach children that problems can have more than one
solution and that questions can have more than one answer.
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The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large
lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.
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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.
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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.
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The arts teach students that small differences can have large
effects. The arts traffic in subtleties.
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The arts teach students to think through and within a
material. All art forms employ some means through which images become real.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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