Learning from
Art
Just what do the arts have to offer school children? Are
they really important? Put most directly, what do the arts have to teach? Join
me on a brief excursion.
First, the arts teach children to exercise that most
exquisite of capacities, the ability to make judgments in the absence of rules.
There is so much in school that emphasizes fealty to rules. The rules that the
arts obey are located in our children’s emotional interior; children come to
feel a rightness of fit among the qualities with which they work. There is no
rule book to provide recipes or algorithms to calculate conclusions. They must
exercise judgment by looking inside themselves.
A second lesson the arts teach children is that problems can
have more than one solution. This too is at odds with the use in our schools of
multiple choice tests in which there are no multiple correct answers. The tacit
lesson is that there is, almost always, a single correct answer. It’s seldom
that way in life.
A third lesson is that aims can be held flexibly; in the
arts the goal one starts with can be changed midway in the process as
unexpected opportunities arrive. Flexibility yields opportunities for surprise.
"Art loves chance. He who errs willingly is the artist," Aristotle said.
Creative thinking abhors routine. Routines may be good for the assembly line,
where surprise is the last thing you want. As our schools become increasingly
managed by an industrial ethos that pre-specifies and then measures outcomes,
there is an increased need for the arts as a counterbalance.
The arts also teach that neither words nor numbers define
the limits of our cognition; we know more than we can tell. There are many
experiences and a multitude of occasions in which we need art forms to say what
literal language cannot say. When we marry and when we bury, we appeal to the
arts to express what numbers and literal language cannot. Reflect on 9/11 and
recall the shrines that were created by those who lost their loved ones, and
those who didn’t. The arts can provide forms of communication that convey to
others what is ineffable.
Finally, the arts are about joy. They are about the
experience of being moved, of having one’s life enriched, of discovering our
capacity to feel. If that was all they did, they would warrant a generous place
at our table.
These are but a few of the lessons that art teaches. What is
ironic is that the forms of thinking the arts develop and refine are precisely
the forms of thinking that our ever-changing world, riddled as it is with ambiguities
and uncertainties, requires in order to cope. Can we make some room for the
arts? Perhaps.
by Elliot W. Eisner
Elliot W. Eiser is a professor of
education and art at