elliot w.

eisner, connoisseurship, criticism and the art of education

Elliot W. Eisner has deepened our appreciation of education in a number of areas. Here
we examine his argument that education involves the exercise of artistry and the
development of connoisseurship and criticism. We also assess his contribution to the
debates around school reform.

Elliot W. Eisner (1933-) has made a significant contribution to our appreciation of

the educational process. He is particularly known for his work in arts education,
curriculum studies, and educational evaluation. However, much of what he has to
say has a resonance for a far wider readership. Among his most noted works are
The Educational Imagination (1979, 1985, 1994) - an exploration of the design and
evaluation of curriculum programmes); The Art of Educational Evaluation (1985) -
a collection of essays covering key aspects of his earlier work; Cognition and
Curriculum (1994) - an examination of the mind and representation); and The
Enlightened Eye (1991, 1998) - the extension of his thinking to qualitative research
into education). He also made an important contribution to the school reform
debate in North America especially through his book, The Kind of Schools We Need
(1998). His examination of process and the artistry of education is of particular
importance for the sphere of informal education (see Jeffs and Smith 2005). His
work shares a number of important themes with John Dewey (on experience,
creativity, education and art), Donald Schö n (on reflective practice) and Howard
Gardner (around multiple intelligences).

Elliot Eisner has received various awards including the Palmer O. Johnson Memorial
Award (from the American Educational Research Association), a John Simon
Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship and five honorary degrees. Eisner
has also served as president of the National Art Education Association, the
International Society for Education through Art, the American Research Association,
and the John Dewey Society.

Elliot W. Eisner - career

Born in 1933 Elliot Eisner grew up in the west side of Chicago. He looked set for
some sort of career in art. From early in his schooling he displayed considerable
talent and this was encouraged by his mother - who hoped he might be a
commercial artist (Uhrmacher 2001: 247). He studied at Roosevelt University,
Chicago (gaining a BA in Art & Education in 1954). P Bruce Uhrmacher reports that
while in college Elliot Eisner worked with African American boys in the American
Boys Commonwealth in the neighbourhood where he grew up). His focus moved
from art as such to art education. He completed an MS (Art Education) at Illinois
Institute of Technology in 1955; an MA (Education) at the University of Chicago in
1958; and a PhD in Education at the University of Chicago in 1962.

Eisner worked as a high school art teacher in Chicago (1956-1958); an art teacher at
the University of Chicago (1958-1960); an instructor in art education at Ohio State
University (1960-1961); and an instructor in education, University of Chicago
(1961-1962). He became an assistant professor of education at the University of
Chicago in 1962. In 1965 he joined the faculty at Stanford - first as an associate
professor of education and art (1965-1970); and then from 1970 on as a professor
of education and art.

Art

From an early point in his career Elliot Eisner was worried that most schools, by
failing to properly appreciate the significance of art, were offering an unnecessarily
narrow and seriously unbalanced approach to education. Moreover, he began to
recognize that many of the then current conceptions of cognition - because they
lacked proper attention to artistic modes of thinking - were inadequate (Uhrmacher
2001: 247). Later, Howard Gardner, was to make a similar point within his
argument for attention to 'multiple intelligences'. Elliot W. Eisner made the case for
developing a proper attention to the cognitive in art rather than it being only driven
by emotional and what were termed 'creative' forces. Uhrmacher (2001: 248)
comments that Eisner 'stressed that environment shapes artistic attitudes and that
art education has unique contributions to make to growing children'. Eisner was
also to argue strongly for a concern for the critical and aesthetic in art education
(see below) - and for a better exploration of historical context. He was later to argue
that approaches which simply gave children arts materials in the hope that their
creativity might flow resulted in programmes 'with little or no structure, limited
artistic content, , and few meaningful aims' (Eisner 1988). Uhrmacher judges that 'in
large measure due to Eisner's advocacy, art education has become a content-
oriented discipline.

Part of the reason for Elliot W. Eisner's influence has been his involvement in key
projects and initiatives. These include the Kettering Project (begun in 1967)
providing curriculum materials for new and untrained elementary teachers (and
based around his theories) and the Getty Center for Education in the Arts (he served
on the advisory board from 1982 on). The Getty Center is well known for its
advocacy of what has become known as 'discipline-based art education' (DBAE) (see
Alexander and Day 1992). DBAE also had it roots in Harry Broudy's advocacy of
aesthetic education during the 1950s. It emphasizes four main content areas
(disciplines): art production, art history, art criticism and aesthetic enquiry.

A further element in Elliot Eisner's influence has been his obvious enthusiasm for
the artistic activity of others. Both he and his wife Ellie are known for their support
of the arts.

Artistry

A further, important, strand to Elliot W. Eisner's work has been his interest in
educational work as artistry. Viewing education work as an expression of artistry
allows us to look beyond the technical and to develop more creative and
appropriate responses to the situations that educators and learners encounter. In
this activity Eisner shares much with Donald Schö n and his advocacy of alternative
approaches to viewing the way that professionals 'think in action' (1988). When we
listen to other educators, for example in team meetings, or have the chance to
observe them in action, we inevitably form judgments about their ability. At one
level, for example, we might be impressed by someone's knowledge of the benefit
system or of the effects of different drugs. However, such knowledge is useless if it
cannot be used in the best way. We may be informed and be able to draw on a range
of techniques, yet the thing that makes educators special is the way in which they
are able to combine these and improvise regarding the particular situation. In so
doing they also draw on an idea of what might be good or make for flourishing (see
Jeffs and Smith 1990). It is this quality that can be described as artistry. It involves a
shift from a focus on technique to one more focused around praxis (see the
discussion of curriculum).

Artistry, therefore, can serve as a regulative ideal for education, a vision that
adumbrates what really matters in schools. To conceive of students as artists who
do their art in science, in the arts, or the humanities, is, after all, both a daunting and
a profound aspiration. It may be that by shifting the paradigm of education reform
and teaching from one modeled after the clocklike character of the assembly line
into one that is closer to the studio or innovative science laboratory might provide
us with a vision that better suits the capacities and the futures of the students we
teach. It is in this sense, I believe, that the field of education has much to learn from
the arts about the practice of education. It is time to embrace a new model for
improving our schools. (Eisner 2004)

Eisner's belief that education had much to learn from the arts naturally led to the his
exploration of the significance of aesthetic judgement and critique - and his
attention to these (particularly in The Art of Educational Evaluation and later in The
Enlightened Eye) has found an appreciative audience among who find the formulaic
and technical orientation of current, dominant approaches to curriculum activity
and education work wanting.

Elliot W. Eisner on connoisseurship and criticism

One of the great benefits of Elliot W. Eisner's activities has been the way in which he
has both made the case for a concern with connoisseurship and criticism, and
mediated these concerns for educators and researchers. The importance of of his
advocacy of these ideas cannot be underestimated - especially at a time when rather
narrow concerns with instrumental outcomes and an orientation to the technical
dominate. Together they offer educators a more helpful and appropriate means to
approach evaluation, for example.

Elliot W. Eisner describes connoisseurship as follows:

Connoisseurship is the art of appreciation. It can be displayed in any realm in

which the character, import, or value of objects, situations, and performances id
distributed and variable, including educational practice. (Eisner 1998: 63)
The word connoisseurship comes from the Latin cognoscere, to know (Eisner 1998:
6). It involves the ability to see, not merely to look. To do this we have to develop the
ability to name and appreciate the different dimensions of situations and
experiences, and the way they relate one to another. We have to be able to draw
upon, and make use of, a wide array of information. We also have to be able to place
our experiences and understandings in a wider context, and connect them with our
values and commitments. Connoisseurship is something that needs to be worked at
– but it is not a technical exercise. The bringing together of the different elements
into a whole involves artistry.

However, educators need to become something more than connoisseurs. They need
to become critics.

If connoisseurship is the art of appreciation, criticism is the art of disclosure.

Criticism, as Dewey pointed out in Art as Experience, has at is end the re-education
of perception... The task of the critic is to help us to see.

Thus… connoisseurship provides criticism with its subject matter.

Connoisseurship is private, but criticism is public. Connoisseurs simply need to
appreciate what they encounter. Critics, however, must render these qualities vivid
by the artful use of critical disclosure. (Eisner 1985: 92-93)

Criticism can be approached as the process of enabling others to see the qualities of
something. As Eisner (1998: 6) puts it, ‘effective criticism functions as the midwife
to perception. It helps it come into being, then later refines it and helps it to become
more acute’. The significance of this for those who want to be educators is, thus,
clear. Educators also need to develop the ability to work with others so that they
may discover the truth in situations, experiences and phenomenon.

Knowledge

Elliot W. Eisner's work around cognition - Cognition and Curriculum (first published
in 1982) revisited and developed in 1994) - has become a significant reference point
in debates around teaching and curriculum making in the United States (and to
some extent in the UK as well). Perhaps best described as a 'cognitive pluralist'
Eisner argues that cognition frequently approached as a phenomenon that deals
with knowing rather than feeling. For Elliot Eisner, knowledge cannot be just a
verbal construct (and constrained by the structures of language). Rather, as Lloyd-
Zannini (1998) has put it (after Eisner) 'knowledge is an intensely variable and
personal "event", something acquired via a combination of one's senses - visual,
auditory, tactile, olfactory, gustatory - assembled according to a personal schema,
and then made public - expressed, typically, by the same sensory modalities utilized
in the initial acquisition'.

The key to developing knowledge within schooling and other educational settings
(such as the family) is to create a varied and stimulating environment in which
people become 'immersed'. Educators also need to encourage people to try make
meaning; to 'read' (or conceptualize) the situation. This they do by constructing
images 'derived from the material the senses provide' and refining 'the senses [as] a
primary means for expanding...[one's own] consciousness' (Eisner 1994 28-9).
People need access to the experience of different forms of representation or symbol
systems. Trying to make sense of these, being encouraged to draw upon them and
play with them, nurtures the imagination and allows people to be more creative in
their responses to the situations in which they find themselves. 'When we define the
curriculum, we are also defining the opportunities the young will have to experience
different forms of consciousness' (Eisner 1994: 44). Eisner, like John Dewey, is clear
that our ability to know is based in our ability to construct meaning from
experiences.

School reform - Elliot W. Eisner's contribution

Uhrmacher (2001: 250) has helpfully adumbrated Elliot W. Eisner's contribution to

school reform around three major poles:

Advocating moving beyond technocratic and behaviouristic modes of thinking -

and for having a concern for 'expressive outcomes'.

Calling to attend to fundamentals. Eisner has consistently warned against

educational fads and fashion. He has criticized dominant paradigms and invited
educators and others to ask questions such as 'what is basic in education?'.

Arguing that schools should help children create meaning from experience, and
that this requires an education devoted to the senses, to meaning-making and the
imagination. Eisner argues for a curriculum that fosters multiple 'literacies' in
students (especially by looking to non-verbal modes of learning and expression) and
a deepening of the 'artistry' of teachers.

Elliot W. Eisner (1998, 2004) has argued strongly for a shift in the emphasis and
direction of schooling. He has commented that educators know experientially that
context matters, 'indeed, context matters most in the "chemistry" that makes for
educational effectiveness'.

Even to talk about effectiveness as though it were independent of the kind of

intellectual values that schools ought to support, seems ill conceived. Thoughtful
educators are not simply interested in achieving known effects; they are interested
as much in surprise, in discovery, in the imaginative side of life and its development
as in hitting predefined targets achieved through routine procedures. 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. (Eisner 2004)

Over the time that Eisner has been writing there have been significant shifts in the
context in which schools have to operate. While there have been other voices calling
for changes in the culture of schooling (notably Howard Gardner in this arena), the
impact of globalization, growing centralization in many schooling systems, reaction
against more process-oriented forms of pedagogy, and a growing instrumentalism
education have served to make Eisner's message both more pertinent to schools,
and more difficult to respond to.

Elliot W. Eisner - an assessment

Here I want to begin by briefly turning to three areas of criticism that relate to some
issues arising when bringing Eisner's thinking into the realm of educational practice.

First, there are some questions around the way in which Elliot Eisner's work around
cognition (and art) has tended to be translated into a discipline-based, rather than a
more child-centred and relational approached (as is arguably the case with Howard
Gardner). In part, the appeal to discipline is linked to Eisner's concern with both
connoisseurship and criticism. The later does lend itself to a location within
particular tradition before critique and movement can be properly attempted - and
this may have something to do with the adoption of the notion of 'discipline' as an
organizing idea. This does not preclude, however, the adoption of 'project' ways of
working as Elliot Eisner has demonstrated in Cognition and Curriculum
Reconsidered.

Second, Elliot W. Eisner is asking educators to develop in particularly sophisticated

ways. To be connoisseurs and critics - as Parker C. Palmer (1998) has shown - they
have to engage in a continuing exploration of themselves, others and their arena of
practice. They have to be able to reflect-in- and -on-action, engage with feelings, and
be able to make informed and committed judgements. Some would argue that many
educators currently in practice are simply not up to this. Indeed, this was a case that
Lawrence Stenhouse made with some force with regard to the difficulties that
classroom teachers had with more process-oriented approaches to curriculum
during the 1970s (see the article on curriculum theory and practice on these pages).
However, it could be the issue here is less about the inherent ability of people to
develop as connoisseurs and critics, and rather more about the quality of
environments that organized educational systems afford both around the
development of their staff and the resources and discretion they have in the
classroom or learning environment.

Third, there will, inevitably, be criticism of Eisner's approach from those who have
come to either view education as commodity or as something that should be
approached as a product. Unfortunately, it is they who dominate the agendas of
many educational systems today (see, for example, the article on globalization and
education on these pages). Those who want to reduce education to training;
constrain exploration by specifying preset outcomes; and focus on what can be
accredited rather than experienced and learnt, will have profound difficulties in
approaching Elliot W. Eisner's work in any meaningful way. For to work in this way
entails entering into what Erich Fromm (1976) called 'being' rather than a 'having'
orientation to the world. It involves approaching education in a completely different
frame of mind - and as Donald Schö n and others have shown this is an exercise
fraught with difficulty.
P. Bruce Uhrmacher has commented that Eisner has striven not merely to infuse
education with art, 'but to make art central to the mission of schools' (2001: 250).
He quotes from The Kind of Schools We Need:

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. This is,
perhaps, the largest lesson that the arts in education can teach, the lesson that life
itself can be led as a work of art. In so doing the maker himself or herself is remade.
The remaking, this re-creation is at the heart of the process of education. (Eisner 1998:
56)

Elliot W. Eisner's contribution has been both to highlight, again, the importance of
art and artistry in education (and research) - and to bring some significant insights
into the process of remaking and re-creation that is education.

Further reading and bibliography

Alexander, Kay and Day, Michael (eds.) (1992) Discipline-based Art Education. A
curriculum sampler, New York: Oxford University Press.

Eisner, Elliot W., and David W. Ecker (1966) Readings in art education, Waltham,
Mass.,: Blaisdell Pub. Co.

Eisner, Elliot W. (1971) Confronting curriculum reform, Boston,: Little Brown.

Eisner, Elliot W. (1972) Educating artistic vision, New York,: Macmillan.

Eisner, Elliot W. and Vallance, Elizabeth (1974) Conflicting conceptions of

curriculum, Berkeley, Calif.,: McCutchan Pub. Corp.

Eisner, Elliot W. (1979, 1985, 1994) The educational imagination: on the design and
evaluation of school programs. New York: Macmillan.

Eisner, Elliot W. (1982) Cognition and curriculum : a basis for deciding what to
teach, New York: Longman.

Eisner, Elliot W. (1985) The art of educational evaluation: a personal view. London: :
Falmer Press.

Eisner, Elliot W. (1988) The role of Discipline-Based Art Education in American

Schools, Los Angeles: Paul Getty Trust.

Eisner, Elliot W., and Peshkin, Alan (1990)Qualitative inquiry in education : the
continuing debate, New York: Teachers College Press.

Eisner, Elliot W. (1991) The enlightened eye : qualitative inquiry and the
enhancement of educational practice. New York: Macmillan.
Eisner, Elliot W. (1994) Cognition and curriculum reconsidered, 2e, New York:
Teachers College Press.

Eisner, Elliot W. (1998) The enlightened eye : qualitative inquiry and the
enhancement of educational practice. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Merrill, 1998.

Eisner, Elliot W. (1998) The kind of schools we need : personal essays, Portsmouth,
NH: Heinemann.

Eisner, Elliot W. (2004) 'Artistry in teaching', Cultural Commons,

http://www.culturalcommons.org/eisner.htm. Accessed: February 11, 2005.

Fromm, Erich (1976) To Have or to Be, 1979 edn. London: Abacus.

Jeffs, Tony and Smith, Mark K. (2005) Informal Education. Conversation, learning
and democracy 3e., Derby: Educational Heretics Press.

Lloyd-Zannini, L. P. (1998) 'A review of Elliot Eisner's Cognition and curriculum

reconsidered', Gifted Child Quarterly, 42 (1), 63-64.

Palmer, Parker C. (1998) The Courage To Teach, Exploring the Inner Landscape of a
Teacher’s Life, San Francisco, California: Jossey-Bass.

Schö n, Donald (1983) The Reflective Practitioner. How professionals think in action,
London: Temple Smith.

Stenhouse, Lawrence (1975) An introduction to Curriculum Research and

Development, London: Heineman.

Uhrmacher, P. Bruce (2001) 'Elliot Eisner' in J. A. Palmer (ed.) Fifty Modern

Thinkers on Education. From Piaget to the present, London: Routledge.

Links

What can education learn from the arts about the practice of education? Elliot W.
Eisner argues that the distinctive forms of thinking needed to create artistically
crafted work are relevant not only to what students do, they are relevant to virtually
all aspects of what we do, from the design of curricula, to the practice of teaching, to
the features of the environment in which students and teachers live. [Originally
given as the John Dewey Lecture for 2002, Stanford University.]

See, on these pages, Howard Garner, Donald Schö n, John Dewey, curriculum theory,
and globalization.

How to cite this article: Smith, M. K. (2005) 'Elliot W. Eisner, connoisseurship,

criticism and the art of education', the encyclopaedia of informal education,
www.infed.org/thinkers/eisner.htm.

© Mark K. Smith 2005

what can education learn from the arts about the practice of
education?
Elliot W. Eisner argues that the distinctive forms of thinking needed to create
artistically crafted work are relevant not only to what students do, they are relevant to
virtually all aspects of what we do, from the design of curricula, to the practice of
teaching, to the features of the environment in which students and teachers live.
[Originally given as the John Dewey Lecture for 2002, Stanford University.]

Before I begin my remarks I want to express my gratitude to the Dewey Society for
inviting me to deliver this address. It’s the third time I have been asked to do so. The
first invitation came from the University of Chicago in 1976, the second from the
Dewey Society in 1979 and the third this year. I regard the invitation as both a
pleasure and a privilege. For both the pleasure and the privilege I thank you.

I want to talk with you today about what education might learn from the arts about
the practice of education. In many ways the idea that education has something to
learn from the arts cuts across the grain of our traditional beliefs about how to
improve educational practice.

Our field, the field of education, has predicated its practices on a platform of
scientifically grounded knowledge, at least as an aspiration. The arts and artistry as
sources of improved educational practice are considered, at best, a fall back
position, a court of last resort, something you retreat to when there is no science to
provide guidance. It is widely believed that no field seeking professional
respectability can depend on such an undependable source.

Despite prevailing doubts I intend to examine what a conception of practice rooted

in the arts might contribute to the improvement of both the means and ends of
education. What I want to do is to foreshadow the grounds for a view of education
that differs in fundamental ways from the one that now prevails. To do this I will be
describing the forms thinking the arts evoke and their relevance for re-framing our
conception of what education might try to accomplish. To secure a perspective for
the analysis, let’s first look at the historical context within which our current
assumptions about reliable and effective practice have been based.

The development of a technicized cognitive culture

As we know when, in the fourth quarter of the 19th century, education was coming
into its own as a field of study it received its initial guidance from psychology. It was
the early psychologists who were interested in making psychology a scientific
enterprise, one that emulated the work done in the so-called “hard sciences.” Their
aim was to develop a physics of psychology; what they called psychophysics and,
consistent with their mission, made laboratories rather than studios the venues for
their work.[1] People like Galton in England and Helmholtz and Fechner in
Germany were among its leaders and even William James, Charles Spearman, and G.
Stanley Hall made passage to Europe to learn the secrets and methods of those
seeking to create a science of mind. One example of the faith placed in a science of
psychology can be found in Edward L. Thorndike’s 1910 lead article in the Journal of
Educational Psychology. He writes:

A complete science of psychology would tell every fact about everyone’s intellect and
character and behavior, would tell the cause of every change in human nature, would
tell the result of every educational force--every act of every person that changed any
other or the person himself--would have. It would aid us to use human beings for the
world’s welfare with the same surety of the result that we now have when we use
falling bodies or chemical elements. In proportion as we get such a science we shall
become the masters of our own souls as we now are masters of heat and light. Progress
toward such a science is being made. [2]

Thorndike’s optimism was not shared by all. James and Dewey, for example, had
reservations regarding what science could provide to so artful an enterprise as
teaching. Never-the-less, by the end of the first quarter of the 20th century the die
was cast. Except for some independent schools, Thorndike won and Dewey lost.[3]
Metaphorically speaking, schools were to become effective and efficient
manufacturing plants. Indeed, the language of manufacture was a part of the active
vocabulary of Thorndike, Taylor, Cubberly and others in the social efficiency
movement. In their vision of education students were raw material to be processed
according to specifications prescribed by supervisors trained in Fredrick Taylor’s
time and motion study.[4]

I suspect that even teachers working during the first quarter of the 20th century
could not be coaxed into employing wholeheartedly the Taylorisms that were
prescribed. Yet for many, especially for those in school administration, the managed
and hyper-rationalized educational world that Fredrick Taylor envisioned became
the methodological ideal needed to create effective and efficient schools.[5]
The influence of psychology on education had another fall-out. In the process
science and art became estranged. Science was considered dependable, the artistic
process was not. Science was cognitive, the arts were emotional. Science was
teachable, the arts required talent. Science was testable, the arts were matters of
preference. Science was useful and the arts were ornamental. It was clear to many
then as it is to many today which side of the coin mattered. As I said, one relied on
art when there was no science to provide guidance. Art was a fall-back position.

These beliefs and the vision of education they adumbrate are not altogether alien to
the contemporary scene. We live at time that puts a premium on the measurement
of outcomes, on the ability to predict them, and on the need to be absolutely clear
about what we want to accomplish. To aspire for less is to court professional
irresponsibility. We like our data hard and our methods stiff—we call it rigor.
From a social perspective it is understandable why tight controls, accountability in
terms of high stakes testing, and the pre-specification of intended outcomes—
standards they are called—should have such attractiveness. When the public is
concerned about the educational productivity of its schools the tendency, and it is a
strong one, is to tighten up, to mandate, to measure, and to manage. The teacher’s
ability to exercise professional discretion is likely to be constrained when the public
has lost confidence in its schools.

It does not require a great leap of imagination or profound insight to recognize that
the values and visions that have driven education during the first quarter of the
20th century are reappearing with a vengeance today. We look for “best methods”
as if they were independent of context; we do more testing than any nation on earth;
we seek curriculum uniformity so parents can compare their schools with other
schools, as if test scores were good proxies for the quality of education. We would
like nothing more than to get teaching down to a science even though the
conception of science being employed has little to do with what science is about.
What we are now doing is creating an industrial culture in our schools, one whose
values are brittle and whose conception of what’s important narrow. We flirt with
payment by results, we pay practically no attention to the idea that engagement in
school can and should provide intrinsic satisfactions, and we exacerbate the
importance of extrinsic rewards by creating policies that encourage children to
become point collectors. Achievement has triumphed over inquiry. I think our
children deserve more.

The technically rationalized industrial culture I speak of did not begin with
psychology; it began with the Enlightenment. The move by Galileo from attention to
the qualitative to a focus on the quantification of relationships was, as Dewey points
out, not merely a modification in method; it was a conceptual revolution.[6] It
represented a fundamental shift in the way the world was viewed and represented.
According to philosopher and historian of science Stephen Toulmin the shift was
from attention to the timely to attention to the timeless, from an emphasis on the
oral to an emphasis on the written, from attention to the particular to the pursuit of
the universal.[7]

The calculation of relations and the search for order represented the highest
expression of our rationality. The ability to use what one learned about nature in
order to harness it to our will was another. Rationality during the Enlightenment
was closer in spirit to the proportions of the Parthanon than to the expressive
contours of the Sistine ceiling. This search for order, this desire for efficiency, this
need to control and predict were then and are dominant values today. They are
values that pervaded the industrial revolution and they are values that reside tacitly
beneath current efforts at school reform. Current educational policy expressed in
President Bush’s 26 billion dollar educational reform agenda is an effort to create
order, to tidy up a complex system, to harness nature, so to speak, so that our
intentions can be efficiently realized.
There is of course virtue in having intentions and the ability to realize them. What is
troublesome is the push towards uniformity, uniformity in aims, uniformity in
content, uniformity in assessment, uniformity in expectation. Of course for
technocrats uniformity is a blessing; it gets rid of complications—or so it is believed.
Statistics can be a comfort; they abstract the particular out of existence. For
example, we comfort ourselves in the belief that we are able to describe just what
every fourth grader should know and be able to do by the time they leave the fourth
grade. To do this we reify an image of an average fourth grader. Of course very few
policy makers have ever visited Ms. Purtle’s fourth grade classroom where they
might encounter red headed Mickey Malone. Mickey is no statistic. As I said
particulars like Mickey Malone complicate life, but they also enrich it.

The point of my remarks thus far is to identify the roots of the increasingly
technicized cognitive culture in which we operate. This culture is so ubiquitous we
hardly see it. And it is so powerful that even when we do recognize it too few of us
say anything. What President Bush has said about our students also applies to us:
When the bandwagon starts rolling we too don’t want to be left behind.

As you can tell I am not thrilled with the array of values and assumptions that drive
our pursuit of improved schools. I am not sure we can tinker towards Utopia and get
there. Nor do I believe we can mount a revolution. What we can do is to generate
other visions of education, other values to guide its realization, other assumptions
on which a more generous conception of the practice of schooling can be built. That
is, although I do not think revolution is an option, ideas that inspire new visions,
values, and especially new practices are. It is one such vision, one that cuts across
the grain, that I wish to explore with you today.

The contours of this new vision were influenced by the ideas of Sir Herbert Read, an
English art historian, poet, and pacifist working during the middle of the last
century.[8] He argued and I concur that the aim of education ought to be conceived
of as the preparation of artists. By the term artist neither he nor I mean necessarily
painters and dancers, poets and playwrights. We mean individuals who have
developed the ideas, the sensibilities, the skills, and the imagination to create work
that is well proportioned, skilfully executed, and imaginative, regardless of the
domain in which an individual works. The highest accolade we can confer upon
someone is to say that he or she is an artist whether as a carpenter or a surgeon, a
cook or an engineer, a physicist or a teacher. The fine arts have no monopoly on the
artistic.

I further want to argue that the distinctive forms of thinking needed to create
artistically crafted work are relevant not only to what students do, they are relevant
to virtually all aspects of what we do, from the design of curricula, to the practice of
teaching, to the features of the environment in which students and teachers live.

Artistically rooted forms of intelligence

What are these distinctive forms of thinking, these artistically rooted qualitative
forms of intelligence? Let me describe six of them for you and the way they might
play out in school.

1. Experiencing qualitative relationships and making judgments

Consider first the task of working on a painting, a poem, a musical score. That task
requires, perhaps above all else, the ability to compose qualitative relationships that
satisfy some purpose. That is, what a composer composes are relationships among a
virtually infinite number of possible sound patterns. A painter has a similar task.
The medium and sensory modality differ but the business of composing
relationships remains. To succeed the artist needs to see, that is, to experience the
qualitative relationships that emerge in his or her work and to make judgments
about them.

Making judgments about how qualities are to be organized does not depend upon
fealty to some formula; there is nothing in the artistic treatment of a composition
like the making and matching activity in learning to spell or learning to use
algorithms to prove basic arithmetic operations. In spelling and in arithmetic there
are correct answers, answers whose correctness can be proven. In the arts
judgments are made in the absence of rule. Of course there are styles of work that
do serve as models for work in the various arts but what constitutes the right
qualitative relationships for any particular work is idiosyncratic to the particular
work. The temperature of a color might be a tad too warm, the edge of a shape might
be a bit too sharp, the percussion might need to be a little more dynamic. What the
arts teach is that attention to such matters matter. The arts teach students to act and
to judge in the absence of rule, to rely on feel, to pay attention to nuance, to act and
appraise the consequences of one’s choices and to revise and then to make other
choices. Getting these relationships right requires what Nelson Goodman calls
“rightness of fit.”[9] Artists and all who work with the composition of qualities try to
achieve a “rightness of fit.”
Given the absence of a formula or an algorithm, how are judgments about rightness
made? I believe they depend upon somatic knowledge, the sense of closure that the
good gestalt engenders in embodied experience; the composition feels right. Work
in the arts cultivates the modes of thinking and feeling that I have described; one
cannot succeed in the arts without such cognitive abilities. Such forms of thought
integrate feeling and thinking in ways that make them inseparable. One knows one
is right because one feels the relationships. One modifies one’s work and feels the
results. The sensibilities come into play and in the process become refined. Another
way of putting it is that as we learn in and through the arts we become more
qualitatively intelligent.

Learning to pay attention to the way in which form is configured is a mode of

thought that can be applied to all things made, theoretical or practical. How a story
is composed in the context of the language arts, how an historian composes her
argument, how a scientific theory is constructed, all of these forms of human
creation profit from attention to the way the elements that constitute them are
configured. We need to help students learn to ask not only what someone is saying,
but how someone has constructed an argument, a musical score, or a visual image.
Curriculum activities can be designed that call attention to such matters, activities
that refine perception in each of the fields we teach. This will require activities that
slow down perception rather than speed it up.

Much of our perception, perhaps most of it, is highly focal. We tend to look for
particular things in our perceptual field. The virtue of such a mode of attention is
that it enables us to find what we are looking for. The potential vice of such
perception is that it impedes our awareness of relationships. The up and back
movement of the visitor to the art gallery when looking at a painting is an example
of an effort to secure both focal awareness and attention to configuration. Teachers
perform similar activities. One of the important tasks of teaching is to be able to
focus on the individual while attending to the larger classroom patterns of which the
individual is a part. To complicate matters these patterns change over time. The
good teacher, like the good short order cook, has to pay attention to several
operations simultaneously, and they do.

2. Flexible purposing

A second lesson that education can learn from the arts pertains to the formulation of
aims. In western models of rational decision-making the formulation of aims, goals,
objectives, or standards is a critical act; virtually all else that follows depends upon
the belief that one must have clearly defined ends: Once ends are conceptualized
means are formulated, then implemented, and then outcomes are evaluated. If there
is a discrepancy between aspiration and accomplishment, new means are
formulated. The cycle continues until xz ends and outcomes are isomorphic. Ends
are held constant and always are believed to precede means.

But is this true? In the arts it certainly is not. In the arts ends may follow means. One
may act and the act may itself suggest ends, ends that did not precede the act, but
follow it. In this process ends shift; the work yields clues that one pursues. In a
sense, one surrenders to what the work in process suggests. This process of shifting
aims while doing the work at hand is what Dewey called “flexible purposing.”[10]
Flexible purposing is opportunistic; it capitalizes on the emergent features
appearing within a field of relationships. It is not rigidly attached to predefined aims
when the possibility of better ones emerge. The kind of thinking that flexible
purposing requires thrives best in an environment in which the rigid adherence to a
plan is not a necessity. As experienced teachers well know, the surest road to hell in
a classroom is to stick to the lesson plan no matter what.

The pursuit, or at least the exploitation of surprise in an age of accountability is

paradoxical. As I indicated earlier, we place a much greater emphasis on prediction
and control than on exploration and discovery. Our inclination to control and
predict is, at a practical level, understandable, but it also exacts a price; we tend to
do the things we know how to predict and control. Opening oneself to the uncertain
is not a pervasive quality of our current educational environment. I believe that it
needs to be among the values we cherish. Uncertainty needs to have its proper place
in the kinds of schools we create.

How can the pursuit of surprise be promoted in a classroom? What kind of

classroom culture is needed? How can we help our students view their work as
temporary experimental accomplishments, tentative resting places subject to
further change? How can we help them work at the edge of incompetence? These
are some the questions that this aim suggests we ask.

3. Form and content is most often inextricable

A third lesson the arts can teach education is that form and content is most often
inextricable. How something is said is part and parcel of what is said. The message is
in the form-content relationship, a relationship that is most vivid in the arts. To
recognize the relationship of form and content in the arts is not to deny that for
some operations in some fields form and content can be separated. I think of
beginning arithmetic, say the addition of two numbers such as 4+ 4. The sum of the
numerals 4+4 can be expressed in literally an infinite number of ways: 8, eight, ////
////, VIII, 300,000- 299,992 and so forth. In all of these examples the arithmetic
conclusion, 8, is the same regardless of the form used to represent it. But for most of
what we do form-content relations do matter. How history is written matters, how
one speaks to a child matters, what a classroom looks like matters, how one tells a
story matters. Getting it right means creating a form whose content is right for some
purpose. The architecture of a school can look and feel like a factory or like a home.
If we want children to feel like factory workers our schools should look and feel like
factories. Form and content matter and in such cases are inseparable.

Indeed, the discovery that form and content are inseparable is one of the lessons the
arts teach most profoundly. Change the cadence in a line of poetry and you change
the poem’s meaning. The creation of expressive and satisfying relationships is what
artistically guided work celebrates.
In the arts there is no substitutability among elements (because there are no
separate elements), in math there is. The absence of substitutability promotes
attention to the particular. Developing an awareness of the particular is especially
important for those of us who teach since the distinctive character of how we teach
is a pervasive aspect of what we teach. The current reform movement would do well
to pay more attention to the messages its policies send to students since those
messages may undermine deeper educational values. The values about which I
speak include the promotion of self initiated learning, the pursuit of alternative
possibilities, and the anticipation of intrinsic satisfactions secured through the use
of the mind. Do we really believe that league tables published in the newspaper
displaying school performance is a good way to understand what schools teach or
that the relentless focus on raising test scores is a good way to insure quality
education? The form we use to display data shapes its meaning.
4. Not everything knowable can be articulated in propositional form

Closely related to the form-content relationship is a fourth lesson the arts can teach
education. It is this. Not everything knowable can be articulated in propositional
form. The limits of our cognition are not defined by the limits of our language. We
have a long philosophic tradition in the West that promotes the view that knowing
anything requires some formulation of what we know in words; we need to have
warrants for our assertions. But is it really the case that what we cannot assert we
cannot know? Not according to Michael Polanyi who speaks of tacit knowledge and
says “We know more than we can tell.”[11] And Dewey tells us that while science
states meaning, the arts express meaning. Meaning is not limited to what is
assertable. Dewey goes on to say that that the aesthetic cannot be separated from
the intellectual for the intellectual to be complete it must bear the stamp of the
aesthetic. Having a nose for telling questions and a feel for incisive answers are not
empty metaphors.

These ideas not only expand our conception of the ways in which we know, they
expand our conception of mind. They point to the cognitive frontiers that our
teaching might explore. How can we help students recognize the ways in which we
express and recover meaning, not only in the arts but in the sciences as well? How
can we introduce them to the art of doing science? After all, the practice of any
practice, including science, can be an art.

It’s clear to virtually everyone that we appeal to expressive form to say what literal
language can never say. We build shrines to express our gratitude to the heroes of
9/11 because somehow we find our words inadequate. We appeal to poetry when
we bury and when we marry. We situate our most profound religious practices
within compositions we have choreographed. What does our need for such practices
say to us about the sources of our understanding and what do they mean for how we
educate? At a time when we seem to want to package performance into
standardized measurable skill sets questions such as these seem to me to be
especially important. The more we feel the pressure to standardize, the more we
need to remind ourselves of what we should not try to standardize.

5. Looking to the medium

A fifth lesson we can learn from the arts about the practice of education pertains to
the relationship between thinking and the material with which we and our students
work. In the arts it is plain that in order for a work to be created we must think
within the constraints and affordances of the medium we elect to use. The flute
makes certain qualities possible that the bass fiddle will never produce, and vice
versa. Painting with watercolor makes certain visual qualities possible that cannot
be created with oil paint. The artist’s task is to exploit the possibilities of the
medium in order to realize aims he or she values. Each material imposes its own
distinctive demands and to use it well we have to learn to think within it.
Where are the parallels when we teach and when students learn in the social
studies, in the sciences, in the language arts? How must language and image be
treated to say what we want to say? How must a medium be treated for the medium
to mediate? How do we help students get smart with the media they are invited to
use and what are the cognitive demands that different media make upon those who
use them. Carving a sculpture out of a piece of wood is clearly a different cognitive
task than building a sculpture out of plasticine clay. The former is a subtractive task,
the latter an additive one. Getting smart in any domain requires at the very least
learning to think within a medium. What are the varieties of media we help children
get smart about? What do we neglect?

It seems to me that the computer has a particularly promising role to play in

providing students with opportunities to learn how to think in new ways. Assuming
the programs can be developed, and it is my impression that many already have,
operations are performable on the computer that cannot be executed through any
other medium. New possibilities for matters of representation can stimulate our
imaginative capacities and can generate forms of experience that would otherwise
not exist. Indeed, the history of art itself is, in large measure, a history studded with
the effects of new technologies. This has been at no time more visible than during
the 20th century. Artists have learned to think within materials such as neon tubing
and plastic, day glow color and corfam steel, materials that make forms possible that
Leonardo daVinci himself could not have conceived of. Each new material offers us
new affordances and constraints and in the process develops the ways in which we
think. There is a lesson to be learned here for the ways in which we design curricula
and the sorts of materials we make it possible for students to work with.

Decisions we make about such matters have a great deal to do with the kinds of
minds we develop in school. Minds, unlike brains, are not entirely given at birth;
minds are also forms of cultural achievement. The kinds of minds we develop are
profoundly influenced by the opportunities to learn that the school provides. And
this is the point of my remarks about what education might learn from the arts. The
kinds of thinking I have described, and it is only a sample, represents the kind of
thinking I believe schools should promote. The promotion of such thinking requires
not only a shift in perspective regarding our educational aims, it represents a shift in
the kind of tasks we invite students to undertake, the kind of thinking we ask them
to do, and the kind of criteria we apply to appraise both their work and ours.
Artistry, in other words, can be fostered by how we design the environments we
inhabit. The lessons the arts teach are not only for our students, they are for us as
well.

Winston Churchill once said that first we design our buildings and then our
buildings design us. To paraphrase Churchill we can say, first we design our
curriculum then our curriculum designs us. What I think many of us want is not only
a form of educational practice whose features, so to speak, “design us,” but a form of
educational practice that enables students to learn how to design themselves. Thus
it might be said that at its best education is a process of learning how to become the
architect of our own education. It is a process that does not terminate until we do.

6. The aesthetic satisfactions that the work itself makes possible

Finally, we come to motives for engagement. In the arts motives tend to be secured
from the aesthetic satisfactions that the work itself makes possible. A part of these
satisfactions is related to the challenge that the work presents; materials resist the
maker, they have to be crafted and this requires an intense focus on the modulation
of forms as they emerge in a material being processed. This focus is often so intense
that all sense of time is lost. The work and the worker become one. At times it is the
tactile quality of the medium that matters, its feel, the giving and resisting quality of
the clay. At other times it is the changing relationships among fields of color. The
arts, in a sense, are supermarkets for the senses. But the arts are far more than
supermarkets for sensory gourmets. In the arts there is an idea which the work
embodies. For the impressionists the idea was light, for the surrealists it was the
unconscious, for the cubists it was time and space, for the American regionalists of
the 1930's it was the ordinary lives of ordinary people that was celebrated. These
interests provided direction to the work but the quality of the work was always
appraised by what it did within experience.

The arts are, in the end, a special form of experience, but if there is any point I wish
to emphasize it is that the experience the arts make possible is not restricted to
what we call the fine arts. The sense of vitality and the surge of emotion we feel
when touched by one of the arts can also be secured in the ideas we explore with
students, in the challenges we encounter in doing critical inquiry, and in the appetite
for learning we stimulate. In the long run these are the satisfactions that matter
most because they are the only ones that insure, if it can be insured at all, that what
we teach students will want to pursue voluntarily after the artificial incentives so
ubiquitous in our schools are long forgotten. It is in this sense especially that the
arts can serve as a model for education.
The agenda I have proposed gives rise to more than a few questions. One is whether
a conception of education that uses art as its regulative ideal is realistic? Is it asking
for too much? My answer is that ideals are always out of reach. It is no different for
education’s ideals. The arts provide the kind of ideal that I believe American
education needs now more than ever. I say now more than ever because our lives
increasingly require the ability to deal with conflicting messages, to make
judgements in the absence of rule, to cope with ambiguity, and to frame imaginative
solutions to the problems we face. Our world is not one that submits to single
correct answers to questions or clear cut solutions to problems; consider what’s
going on in the Middle East. We need to be able not only to envision fresh options,
we need to have feel for the situations in which they appear. In a word, the forms of
thinking the arts stimulate and develop are far more appropriate for the real world
we live in than the tidy right angled boxes we employ in our schools in the name of
school improvement.
The creation of a new culture of schooling

This brings us to the final portion of my remarks. Thus far I have tried to describe
my concerns about our current efforts to use highly rationalized standardized
procedures to reform education and to describe their historical roots. I then
advanced the notion that genuine change depends upon a vision of education that is
fundamentally different from the one that guides today’s efforts at school reform. I
proposed that education might well consider thinking about the aim of education as
the preparation of artists and I proceeded to describe the modes of thinking the arts
evoke, develop and refine. These forms of thinking, as I indicated earlier, relate to
relationships that when acted upon require judgment in the absence of rule, they
encourage students and teachers to be flexibly purposive; (its O.K. for aims to shift
in process), they recognize the unity of form and content, they require one to think
within the affordances and constraints of the medium one elects to use and they
emphasize the importance of aesthetic satisfactions as motives for work. In addition,
I alluded to some of the locations in the context of schooling in which those forms of
thinking might be developed.

In describing some of the forms of thinking the arts occasion, of necessity I had to
fragment what is a seamless, unified process. I want therefore to emphasis here that
I am not talking about the implementation of isolated curriculum activities, but
rather, the creation of a new culture of schooling that has as much to do with the
cultivation of dispositions as with the acquisition of skills.

At the risk of propagating dualisms, but in the service of emphasis, I am talking

about a culture of schooling in which more importance is placed on exploration than
on discovery, more value is assigned to surprise than to control, more attention is
devoted to what is distinctive than to what is standard, more interest is related to
what is metaphorical than to what is literal. It is an educational culture that has a
greater focus on becoming than on being, places more value on the imaginative than
on the factual, assigns greater priority to valuing than to measuring, and regards the
quality of the journey as more educationally significant than the speed at which the
destination is reached. I am talking about a new vision of what education might
become and what schools are for.

Conclusion

I want to bring my remarks to a close by reminding all of us here that visions, no

matter how grand, need to be acted upon to become real. Ideas, clearly, are
important. Without them change has no rudder. But change also needs wind and a
sail to catch it. Without them there is no movement. Frankly, this may be the most
challenging aspect of the proposal I have made. The public’s perception of the
purpose of education supports the current paradigm. We need to sail against the
tide.

Our destination is to change the social vision of what schools can be. It will not be an
easy journey but when the seas seem too treacherous to travel and the stars too
distant to touch we should remember Robert Browning’s observation that “A man’s
reach should exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for.”[12]

Browning gives us a moral message, one generated by the imagination and

expressed through the poetic. And as Dewey said in the closing pages of Art as
Experience, “Imagination is the chief instrument of the good.” Dewey went on to say
that, “Art has been the means of keeping alive the sense of purposes that outrun
evidence and of meanings that transcend indurated habit.”[13]

Imagination is no mere ornament, nor is art. Together they can liberate us from our
indurated habits. They might help us restore decent purpose to our efforts and help
us create the kind of schools our children deserve and our culture needs. Those
aspirations, my friends, are stars worth stretching for.

Further reading and bibliography

[1]. Edwin Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology, Third Edition. New York:
Appleton Century Crofts, 1957.

[2] Edward L. Thorndike, “The Contribution of Psychology to Education”, Journal of

Educational Psychology, Vol.. 1, 1910, pp. 6., 8.

[3] For a lucid story of research in education see Ellen Lagemann, An Elusive
Science: The Troubling History of Educational Research, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2000.

[4] Raymond Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1962

[5] ibid

[6] Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, New York: The
Free Press, 1990.

[7] ibid

[8] Herbert Read, Education Through Art, London: Pantheon, 1944

[9] Nelson Goodman. Ways of World-making, Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing, 1978.

[10] John Dewey, Experience and Education, New York,: Macmillan and Co. 1938.

[11] Michael Polyani, The Tacit Dimension, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1967.

[12] Robert Browning, “Andrea del Sarto, in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, Edited
by Alexander Allison, et. al. New York: Norton, 1983.

[13] John Dewey, Art As Experience, New York: Minton Balch and Co. 1934. Pp.348.

Links
How to cite this article: Eisner, Elliot W. (2002) 'What can education learn from the
arts about the practice of education?', the encyclopedia of informal education,
www.infed.org/biblio/eisner_arts_and_the_practice_or_education.htm .

[The headings in this piece were added by infed.org and were not in the original.]

© Elliot W. Eisner 2002, 2005. Reproduced here with the permission of the author.