Elliot W. Eisner Quotes

The Arts are fundamental resources through which the world is viewed, meaning is created, and the mind developed. To neglect the contribution of the Arts in education, either through inadequate time, resources, or poorly trained teachers, is to deny children access to one of the most stunning aspects of their culture and one of the most potent means for developing their minds.

The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.

The ultimate aim of education is to enable individuals to become the architects of their own education and through that process to continually reinvent themselves.

The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.

Art is literacy of the heart

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.

Schools are not about enabling children to have a living but about children being able to have a life.

The important outcomes of schooling include not only the acquisition of new conceptual tools, refined sensibilities, a developed imagination, and new routines and techniques, but also new attitudes and dispositions. The disposition to continue to learn throughout life is perhaps one of the most important contributions that schools can make to an individual's development.

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.

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.

The kinds of nets we know how to weave determine the kinds of nets we cast. These nets, in turn, determine the kinds of fish we catch.

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.

The disposition to continue to learn throughout life is perhaps one of the most important contributions that schools can make to an individual's development.

The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.

Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.

All art forms employ some means through which images become real.

The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic in subtleties.

In some sense our aim ought to be to convert the school from an academic institution into an intellectual one. That shift in the culture of schooling would represent a profound shift in emphasis and in direction.

If apple is the language of the future, then art must be the core.

Minds, unlike brains, are not entirely given at birth. Minds are also forms of cultural achievement.

The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem-solving, purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity.

The Arts' position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important.

The needs of children during adolescence are particular and acute. They need an opportunity to develop a sense of identity and to maintain the sense of security that emanates from group acceptance.

The arts inform as well as stimulate; they challenge as well as satisfy. Their location is not limited to galleries, concert halls and theatres. Their home can be found wherever humans chose to have attentive and vita intercourse with life itself.

We have inadvertently designed a system in which being good at what you do as a teacher is not formally rewarded, while being poor at what you do is seldom corrected nor penalized.