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By Elliot W. Eisner
SPECIAL TO THE LOS ANGELES TIMES
Recent efforts to assess and reform our schools
- such as global education rankings released in December and the
No Child Left Behind law - have focused attention on four so-called
"core" subjects; reading, writing, math and science. No
effort has been made to address more fundamental questions regarding
what we teach and why.
Although we don't think about it this way, a school's
curriculum is a mind-altering device, a means through which children's
minds are shaped with ideas, skills and beliefs about the world.
Because what we teach the young is so important, we need to be particularly
careful about what we include and equally as careful about what
we don't.
What we do teach is far more likely to be the
offshoot of embedded traditions and our efforts to boost test scores,
as if test scores were a meaningful proxy for the quality of education
our students receive. They are not.
One of the casualties of our preoccupation with
test scores is the presence - or should I say the absence - of the
arts in our schools. When they do appear they are usually treated
as ornamental rather than substantive aspects of our children's
school experience. The arts are considered nice but not necessary.
Just what do the arts have to offer to our 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.
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Elliot W. Eisner, a professor of education and
art at Stanford University, is the author of "The Arts and
the Creation of Mind."
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