10 Things the Arts Teach Us
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Why do the Arts matter? Why is it important for children to have an Arts Education? Why is it important to engage in the Arts by making and creating? One of my favorite scholars to study from is Elliot Eisner, a world renowned Arts Advocate and Educator. His decades of research have proved the undeniable impact the arts have on youth and human wellbeing. Here are 10 fundamental lessons the Arts teach, shared from Eisner’s book, The arts and the creation of the mind.
#1: Good Judgement
The arts teach us to make good judgement about qualitative relationships. Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgement rather than rules prevail.
#2: More than one solution
The arts teach that problems can have mire than one solution and questions can have more than one answer
#3: perspectives
The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of the large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.
#4: possibilities
The arts teach that complex forms of a 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: Cognition
The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal from nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits offer cognition.
#6: effects
The arts teach that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic subtleties.
#7: images
The arts teach students to thing through and within a material. All art forms employ some means through which images become real.
#8: feel
The arts help us to say what cannot be said. When children ae 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: discover
The arts enable us Mohave 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: importance
The arts’ position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important.