Ten Lessons The Arts Teach
The arts teach children to make good
judgments about qualitative
relationships.
Unlike much of the curriculum in which
correct answers and rules prevail, in
the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that
prevail.
The arts teach children that problems
can have more than one solution
and that questions can have more than
one answer.
The arts celebrate multiple
perspectives.
One of their large lessons is that
there are many ways to see and interpret
the world.
The arts teach children that in
complex forms of problem solving
purposes are seldom fixed, but change
with circumstance and opportunity.
Learning in the arts requires the
ability and a willingness to surrender
to the unanticipated possibilities of
the work as it unfolds.
The arts make vivid the fact that
neither words in their literal form nor
number exhaust what we can know. The
limits of our language do not define the
limits of our cognition.
The arts teach students that small
differences can have large effects.
The arts traffic in subtleties.
The arts teach students to think
through and within a material.
All art forms employ some means
through which images become real.
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.
The arts enable us to have experience
we can have from no other source and through such experience to
discover the range and variety of what
we are capable of feeling.
The arts’ position in the school
curriculum symbolizes to the young
what adults believe is important.