Elliot W. Eisner Quotes

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

  Elliot W. Eisner

  Art, Children, Answers

  88 Copy quote

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

  Elliot W. Eisner

  Teacher, Art, Children

  76 Copy quote

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

  Elliot W. Eisner

  Aim Of Education, Individual, Architect

  63 Copy quote

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

  Elliot W. Eisner

  Art, Perspective, World

  52 Copy quote

• Art is literacy of the heart

  Elliot W. Eisner

  Art, Heart, Literacy

  60 Copy quote

• The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said. When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.

  Elliot W. Eisner

  Art, Jobs, Children

  38 Copy quote

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

  Elliot W. Eisner

  Children, School, Enabling

  32 Copy quote

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

  Elliot W. Eisner

  Education, Attitude, School

  Elliot W. Eisner (2002). “The Arts and the Creation of Mind”, p.240, Yale University Press

  34 Copy quote

• The arts make vivid the fact that words do not, in their literal form or number, exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.

  Elliot W. Eisner

  Art, Numbers, Vivid

  29 Copy quote

• The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships. Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts it is judgment rather than rules that prevail.

  Elliot W. Eisner

  Art, Children, Answers

  28 Copy quote

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

  Elliot W. Eisner

  Kind, Fishes, Turns

  Elliot W. Eisner “Cognition and Curriculum Reconsidered”, Teachers College Press

  43 Copy quote

• The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.

  Elliot W. Eisner

  Art, Feelings, Experience

  34 Copy quote

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

  Elliot W. Eisner

  Learning, School, Important

  31 Copy quote

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

  Elliot W. Eisner

  Limits, Cognition, Language

  25 Copy quote

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

  Elliot W. Eisner

  Art, Surrender, Possibility

  20 Copy quote

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

  Elliot W. Eisner

  Art, Real, Mean

  34 Copy quote

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

  Elliot W. Eisner

  Art, Differences, Perception

  24 Copy quote

• 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.

  Elliot W. Eisner

  Education, School, Profound

  19 Copy quote

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

  Elliot W. Eisner

  Art, Apples, Language

  24 Copy quote

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

  Elliot W. Eisner

  Achievement, Brain, Mind

  Elliot W. Eisner (2005). “Reimagining Schools: The Selected Works of Elliot W. Eisner”, p.212, Taylor & Francis

  23 Copy quote

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

  Elliot W. Eisner

  Education, Art, Believe

  "The Arts and the Creation of Mind". Book by Elliot W. Eisner, www.huffingtonpost.com. 2002.

  17 Copy quote

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

  Elliot W. Eisner

  Art, Children, Opportunity

  14 Copy quote

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

  Elliot W. Eisner

  Children, Acceptance, Opportunity

  13 Copy quote

• 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.

  Elliot W. Eisner

  Art, Home, Challenges

  13 Copy quote

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

  Elliot W. Eisner

  Education, Teacher, Military

  16 Copy quote

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