4 journal of Cumiculum and Supervision

Fill 2002, Vol. 18 No. 1, 4-16

WHAT CAN EDUCATION LEARN FROM THE ARTS

ABOUT THE PRACTICE OF EDUCATION?
ELLIOT W. EISNER, Stanford University

B efore 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 invita-
tion 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 aspi-
ration. The arts and artistry as sources of improved educational prac-
tice are considered, at best, a fallback position, a court of last resort,
something you retreat to when there is no science to provide guid-
ance. It is widely believed that no field seeking professional re-
spectability can depend on such an undependable source.
Despite prevailing doubts, I intend to examine what a concep-
tion of practice rooted in the arts might contribute to the improve-
ment 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 of thinking the arts evoke and their rele-
vance for reframing 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.

Editor's note: Professor Eisner delivered this paper as the John Dewey Lecture
of 2002 at a session of the John Dewey Society at the annual meeting of the Amer-
ican Educational Research Association, New Orleans, LA, on April 25, 2002.
 Elliot W Eisner 5

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 psy-
chophysics-and, consistent with their mission, they made laborato-
ries rather than studios the venues for their work.' People like Gal-
ton in England and Helmholtz and Fechner in Germany were among
its leaders, and even William James, Charles Spearman, and G. Stan-
ley Hall made passage to Europe to learn the secrets and methods
of those seeking to create a science of the 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 EducationalPsychol-
ogy. 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 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

Thomdike'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. Nevertheless, by the end of the
first quarter of the 20th century, the die was cast. Except for some in-
dependent schools, Thomdike won and Dewey lost.3 Metaphorically
speaking, schools were to become effective and efficient manufactur-
ing plants. Indeed, the language of manufacture was a part of the ac-
tive vocabulary of Thomdike, Taylor, Cubberly, and others in the so-
cial 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

1
Edwin Boring, A History of ExperimentalPsychology, 3rd ed. (New York: Ap-
pleton Century Crofts, 1957).
2
Edward L. Thorndike, "The Contribution of Psychology to Education," Jour-
nal of EducationalPsychology 1 (1910): 6, 8.
3
For a lucid story of research in education see Ellen Lagemann, An Elusive Sci-
ence. The Troubling History of EducationalResearch (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2000).
4
Raymond Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1962).
6 What Can Education Learn from the Arts About the Practiceof Education?

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 meth- 5
odological ideal needed to create effective and efficient schools.
The influence of psychology on education had another fallout.
In the process, science and art became estranged. Science was con-
sidered dependable; the artistic process was not. Science was cogni-
tive; the arts were emotional. Science was teachable; the arts required
talent. Science was testable; the arts were matters of preference. Sci-
ence was useful; 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 fallback position.
These beliefs and the vision of education they adumbrate are
not altogether alien to the contemporary scene. We live at a time
that puts a premium on the measurement of outcomes, on the abil-
ity to predict them, and on the need to be absolutely clear about
what we want to accomplish. To aspire for less is to court profes-
sional irresponsibility. We like our data hard and our methods stiff-
we call it rigor.
From a social perspective, it is understandable why tight con-
trols, accountability in terms of high-stakes testing, and the pre-spec-
ification 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 man-
age. 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 in-
sight to recognize that the values and visions that have driven edu-
cation 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 im-
portant narrow. We flirt with payment by results, we pay practically
5
1bid.
Elliot W Eisner 7

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 be-
come 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 quan-
tification of relationships was, as Dewey points out, not merely a
modification in method; it was a conceptual revolution. 6 It repre-
sented a fundamental shift in the way the world was viewed and rep-
resented. 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 writ-
ten, 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 pro-
portions of the Parthenon than to the expressive contours of the Sis-
tine ceiling. This search for order, this desire for efficiency, this need
to control and predict were then and are today dominant values.
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
educational reform agenda is an effort to create order, to tidy up a
complex system, to harness nature, so to speak, so that our inten-
tions 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 de-
scribe just what every 4th grader should know and be able to do by
the time they leave the 4th grade. To do this we reify an image of
an average 4th grader. Of course, very few policymakers have ever
visited Ms. Purtle's 4th grade classroom, where they might encounter
redheaded Mickey Malone. Mickey is no statistic. As I said, particu-
lars like Mickey Malone complicate life, but they also enrich it.

6
Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York:
Free Press, 1990).
7
1bid.
8 Wlhat Can Education Learn from the Arts About the Practice of Education?

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 as-
sumptions 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
8
during the middle of the last century. 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, skillfully 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.
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.
Consider first the task of working on a painting, a poem, a mu-
sical 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 infi-
nite number of possible sound patterns. A painter has a similar task.
The medium and sensory modality differ, but the business of com-
8
Herbert Read, Edlucation 7hrough Art (London: Pantheon, 1944).
Elliot W Eisner 9

posing 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 artis-
tic treatment of a composition like the making and matching activity
in learning to spell or learning to use algorithms to prove basic arith-
metic operations. In spelling and in arithmetic, there are correct an-
swers, answers whose correctness can be proven. In the arts, judg-
ments 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, matters. 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 "right-
ness of fit." 9 Artists and all who work with the composition of qual-
ities try to achieve a "rightness of fit."
Given the absence of a formula or an algorithm, how are judg-
ments 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 re-
lationships. One modifies one's work and feels the results. The sen-
sibilities 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 be-
come more qualitatively intelligent.
Learning to pay attention to the way in which form is config-
ured 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 a 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,
9
Nelson Goodman, Ways of World-making (Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing,
1978).
10 What Can EducationLearn from the Arts About the Practice of Education?

a musical score, or a visual image. Curriculum activities can be de-

signed that call attention to such matters, activities that refine per-
ception 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 look-
ing 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 ef-
fort 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 com-
plicate matters, these patterns change over time. The good teacher,
like the good short-order cook, has to pay attention to several opera-
tions simultaneously, and they do.
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 accom-
plishment, new means are formulated. The cycle continues until 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 pur-
posing."1 0 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 emerges. 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
10
John Dewey, Experience and Education (New York: Macmillan and Co.,
1938).
 Elliot W Eisner 11

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 uncer-
tain 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 stu-
dents 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 of the
questions that this aim suggests we ask.
A third lesson the arts can teach education is that form and con-
tent are most often inextricable. How something is said is part and
parcel of what is said. The message is in the form-content relation-
ship, 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 con-
clusion, 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; bow 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 pur-
pose. 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 mat-
ter, 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 ca-
dence 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 per-
vasive 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
12 What Can Education Learn from the Arts About the Practiceof Education?

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 publishing league tables in the news-
paper 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 ensure quality education? The form we use to dis-
play data shapes its meaning.
Closely related to the form-content relationship is a fourth les-
son 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 philo-
sophic 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."'1 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 the aesthetic cannot be sep-
arated from the intellectual, and 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 re-
cover 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 prac-
tice 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 ex-
press 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, ques-
tions such as these seem to me to be especially important. The more
we feel the pressure to standardize, the more we need to remind our-
selves of what we should not try to standardize.

"1Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1967).
Elliot W Eisner 13

A fifth lesson we can learn from the arts about the practice of
education pertains to the relationship between thinking and the ma-
terial 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 con-
straints and affordances of the medium we elect to use. The flute
makes certain qualities possible that the bass fiddle will never pro-
duce, 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 de-
mands, 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 been, operations are per-
formable 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 plas-
tic, day-glow color and corfam steel, materials that make forms pos-
sible 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 influ-
enced by the opportunities to learn that the school provides. And this
14 What Can Education Learn from the Arts About the Practice of Education?

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 sam-
ple, represent the kind of thinking I believe schools should promote.
The promotion of such thinking requires not only a shift in perspec-
tive 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 prac-
tice whose features, so to speak, "design us," but a form of educa-
tional practice that enables students to learn how to design them-
selves. 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.
Finally, we come to motives for engagement. In the arts, motives
tend to be secured from the aesthetic satisfactions that the work it-
self makes possible. A part of these satisfactions is related to the chal-
lenge 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 1930s 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 al-
ways 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 makes 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 stu-
dents, 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
Elliot W Eisner 15

ensure, if it can be ensured 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 ed-
ucation needs now more than ever. I say now more than ever be-
cause our lives increasingly require the ability to deal with conflict-
ing messages, to make judgments 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 envi-
sion 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.
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 de-
scribe 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 de-
scribe 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 (it's OK for
aims to shift in process); they recognize the unity of form and con-
tent; 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 emphasize here that I am not talking about the
implementation of isolated curriculum activities, but rather the cre-
ation of a new culture of schooling that has as much to do with the
cultivation of dispositions as with the acquisition of skills.
16 What Can Education Learn from the Arts About the Practice of Education?

At the risk of propagating dualisms, but in the service of em-

phasis, 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.
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. With-
out them there is no movement. Frankly, this may be the most chal-
lenging 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 'JaIrt has been
the means of keeping alive the sense of purposes that outrun evi-
dence 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 de-
cent 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.

ELLIOT W. EISNER is the Lee L. Jacks Professor of Child Education at Stanford

University, Palo Alto, CA; phone: (650) 723-2100; e-mail: [email protected].

12
Robert Browning, "Andrea del Sarto," in The Norton Anthologv of Poetry, ed.
Alexander Allison et al. (New York: Norton, 1983).
'3 John Dewey, Art as Fxperience (New York: Minton Balch and Co., 1934),
p. 348.
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TITLE: What Can Education Learn from the Arts about the
Practice of Education?
SOURCE: Journal of Curriculum and Supervision 18 no1 Fall 2002
WN: 0228802453002

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