I personally don’t need a statistic to tell me that art education benefits a child. After 20 years of teaching drawing, and watching students transform almost instantly before my very eyes – I KNOW what art education does for a student. I have seen that transformation thousands of times in my classrooms. I have seen and experienced the benefits firsthand. But for those of you who have not been exposed to the direct benefits of art education – here is a list I think you’ll find very valuable.
Elliott Eisner, a Professor of Education at Stanford University has identified 10 lessons which are clarified through the study of Art in the schools.
Ten Lessons the Arts Teach
1. 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.
2. The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.
3. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.
4. 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.
5. 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.
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 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.
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.
March 29, 2008 at 5:27 pm
How insightful you are. You have touched on the essential components for nurturing children, especially #’s 6 and 8. However, what the arts do not teach children is that once they become adults their experience of the arts will be filtered through the controls established by curators, critics, producers, conductors, directors, and of course the artists themselves. The child needs to know how to hang onto her own vision, her own experiences, and to value them . The arts do indeed traffic in subtleties, but in the adult world those nuances morph into judgements, what is good art, what is bad art. Only the insiders get to choose.
It’s a big life lesson.
April 10, 2008 at 2:51 pm
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