Introduction

Eisner, Elliot W.

Save Cite Share

Free

Introduction

Elliot W. Eisner

The Arts and the Creation of Mind

The Arts and the Creation of Mind situates the arts in our schools and examines how they contribute to the growth of mind. Traditional views of cognition and the implications of these views for the goals and content of education have put the arts at the rim, rather than at the core, of education. Schools see their mission, at least in part, as promoting the development of the intellect....

Author

Elliot W. Eisner

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31762

Introduction

The Arts and the Creation of Mind situates the arts in our schools and examines how they contribute to the growth of mind. Traditional views of cognition and the implications of these views for the goals and content of education have put the arts at the rim, rather than at the core, of education. Schools see their mission, at least in part, as promoting the development of the intellect. “Hard” subjects such as mathematics and science are regarded as primary resources for that development, and the processes of reading, writing, and computing are believed to be the best means for cultivating the mind. We want, especially in America today, a tough curriculum, something rigorous, a curriculum that challenges students to think and whose effects are visible in higher test scores. At best the arts are considered a minor part of this project.

Although the arts in American schools are theoretically among the so-called core subjects, and although school districts and indeed the federal government identify them as such, there is a huge ambivalence about their position in the curriculum. No one wants to be regarded as a philistine. Yet at the same time privilege of place is generally assigned to other subject areas. Despite the recent hoopla about their contributions to academic performance, the arts are regarded as nice but not necessary.

One aim of The Arts and the Creation of Mind is to dispel the idea that the arts are somehow intellectually undemanding, emotive rather than reflective operations done with the hand somehow unattached to the head. In the following pages I advance quite a different view. I argue that many of the most complex and subtle forms of thinking take place when students have an opportunity either to work meaningfully on the creation of images—whether visual, choreographic, musical, literary, or poetic—or to scrutinize them appreciatively. To be able to create a form of experience that can be regarded as aesthetic requires a mind that animates our imaginative capacities and that promotes our ability to undergo emotionally pervaded experience. Perception is, in the end, a cognitive event.1See Ulric Neisser, Cognition and Reality: Principles and Implications for Cognitive Psychology (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1976). What we see is not simply a function of what we take from the world, but what we make of it.

The world that students now live in and that they will enter as adults is riddled with ambiguities, uncertainties, the need to exercise judgment in the absence of rule, and the press of the feelingful as a source of information for making difficult choices. Whether work in the arts has consequences that extend to all aspects of the world cannot now be determined with any degree of confidence. What can be determined with a high degree of confidence is that work in the arts evokes, refines, and develops thinking in the arts. We might cautiously reason that meaningful experience in the arts might have some carryover to domains related to the sensory qualities in which the arts participate.

But carryover to the extra-artistic or extra-aesthetic aspects of life is not, in my view, the primary justification for the arts in our schools. The arts have distinctive contributions to make. I count among them the development of the thinking skills in the context of an art form, the expression and communication of distinctive forms of meaning, meaning that only artistically crafted forms can convey, and the ability to undergo forms of experience that are at once moving and touching, experiences of a consummatory nature, experiences that are treasured for their intrinsic value. These are experiences that can be secured when one attends to the world with an aesthetic frame of reference and interacts with forms that make such experience possible.

But the arts do more than serve the needs of individuals, as important as such a contribution might be. The arts, I argue, can serve as models of what educational aspiration and practice might be at its very best. To be able to think about teaching as an artful undertaking, to conceive of learning as having aesthetic features, to regard the design of an educational environment as an artistic task—these ways of thinking about some of the commonplaces of education could have profound consequences for redesigning the practice of teaching and reconceiving the context in which teaching occurs.

We have had a tendency, especially in the United States, to embrace a form of technical rationality designed to assuage our anxiety about the quality of our schools. The tack that we have taken is to specify in no uncertain terms our expectations, to prescribe content and procedures related to them—”alignment” it is called— and then to monitor and to measure the consequences. The tacit view is to create an efficient system, a system that will help us achieve, without surprise or eventfulness, the aims that we seek.

The arts, in contrast, have little room on their agenda for efficiency, at least as a high-level value. Efficiency is largely a virtue for the tasks we don’t like to do; few of us like to eat a great meal efficiently or to participate in a wonderful conversation efficiently, or indeed to make love efficiently. What we enjoy the most we linger over. A school system designed with an overriding commitment to efficiency may produce outcomes that have little enduring quality. Children, like the rest of us, seldom voluntarily pursue activities for which they receive little or no satisfaction. Experiencing the aesthetic in the context of intellectual and artistic work is a source of pleasure that predicts best what students are likely to do when they can do whatever they would like to do.

As you read this book, you will find that it often dances between references to art, by which I mean the visual arts, and references to the arts, by which I mean all the arts. I am afraid that consulting the context is the only way to resolve this potential ambiguity. I hope that this acknowledged inconsistency will cause no consternation.

Another issue that should be mentioned has to do with my conviction that not all works of art are created equal. There are human achievements in every culture on this earth that represent the quintessential attainments of the human imagination, works of such stunning accomplishment that they alter the ways in which those who see or hear or read them look upon the world. At the same time, I want to acknowledge that any practice whatsoever can have aesthetic or artistic qualities. This includes three-year-olds building castles in the sand as well as surgeons engaged in a life-sustaining operation. What is aesthetic depends at least in part on the way some feature of the phenomenal world is addressed. Castles in the sand may be among the beginning efforts. It falls to those of us in education to try to design the situations in which children’s efforts become increasingly more sophisticated, sensitive, imaginative, and skilled. This is no small task, and no minor achievement when realized.

1 See Ulric Neisser, Cognition and Reality: Principles and Implications for Cognitive Psychology (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1976). »

Previous chapter

Base text size -

Chapter images ()