THE AIM of this special section of Kappan is to change way you think about arts in American schools. The dominant of arts is one that distances them from complex and subtle forms of thought. Abstraction, so this common goes, is a process that belongs to sciences and to mathematics. The arts are more engaged with matters of feeling and with use of hand, and they rely more on imagination than There is some truth to that arts traffic in feelings and that they employ hand--or foot or voice or gesture--to do their important work. But it is a mistake to believe that such characteristics remove arts from matters of mind. The essays in this section--written by scholars steeped in music, visual arts, dance, and cognition--make another case and provide another of educational functions of arts. The importance of understanding this view is critical for making wise judgments about content and aims of school programs and place of arts in those programs. No decision is of greater importance than determining what to teach and toward what ends. Subjects whose educational value is misunderstood are often marginalized in curriculum, thus robbing students of opportunities to learn what these fields have to offer. But what someone doesn't know or have an opportunity to learn may be as important as what someone does know. Thus, when we make decisions based upon faulty conceptions of features or functions of a field, we risk creating a null curriculum, a curriculum whose significance resides in what it leaves out rather than what it puts in, one that diminishes students' opportunity to experience world through lenses that excluded field provides. Indeed, I would say that current context in American education, a context focused on measurement of achievement with respect to discrete standards, provides most compelling reason for arts in our schools. When education policy emphasizes display and achievement of uniformity, when it diminishes opportunities for imagination to flourish, when it considers metaphor and ambiguity to be problematic, both argument and need for arts become even stronger. The central theme of this section of Kappan is the arts and intellect. We don't normally relate intellect to arts. The intellect typically connotes something that is both profound and abstract. Models of intellection are created mainly by scholars working outside of arts. Insofar as schools strive to be intellectual rather than merely academic places--a rare but important aspiration--the models that are routinely appealed to are, as I indicated above, mathematics and sciences. Where does such an idea come from? How did it become a part of our perspective on content of school programs? The roots of such beliefs hark back to Plato and his conception of realms of reality. One of these realms Plato called intellectual world, other visible world. The visible world encompassed things that human beings made with their hands. It also consisted of shadows and reflections of things that one encountered in life. Both were vague and fugitive reflections of what is real. The intellectual world, on other hand, was concerned with ideas about things and, even more profoundly, with ideas about ideas, latter being purview of philosophy. For Greeks, reasoning had little to do with matters of feeling and much to do with matters of rationality. Rationality itself was conceptualized narrowly to refer to relationship between reason and language. Reason needed language to flourish. Given this perspective, it is not surprising that arts took on a marginal position. They were conceived of as imitations that did not depend on reason. They still are. In describing Plato's hierarchy of knowledge, which Socrates discusses in Book Six of The Republic, I do not wish to give impression that reason for marginalizing arts has anything to do with a rational analysis of contributions that different subjects make to educational development of young. …

This article explores the tensions between Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences and current educational policies emphasizing standardized and predictable outcomes. The article situates Gardner's theory within the historical interests among psychometricians in identifying those core processes that constitute human intelligence. Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences provides a significant contrast to the models of mind that have traditionally been used to understand how people think and make intelligent choices. The pursuit of a single G factor is contrasted with an array of specific intelligences in Gardner's conception. The implications of Gardner's view for education pertain to the cultivation of the various ways in which humans reflect intelligently and the implicit recommendation that individual proclivities, interests, and intelligences be cultivated. Such an approach to schooling would yield differences among the outcomes for children whose intelligences differed. It is this orientation to the aims of education that conflicts dramatically with a standards-driven approach to school improvement.

The unknowable future is not a sound basis on which to plan curriculum.

Those of us who wish to exercise leadership in education must do more than simply accept the inadequate criteria that are now used to determine how well our schools are doing, Mr. Eisner warns. DRIVEN by discontent with the performance of our schools, we are, once again, in the midst of education reform, as we were in 1983 with A Nation at Risk, in 1987 with America 2000, and a few years later with Goals 2000. Each of these reform efforts was intended to rationalize the practice and performance of our schools. Each was designed to work out and install a system of measurable goals and evaluation practices that would ensure that our nation would be first in science and mathematics by the year 2000, that all our children would come to school ready to learn, and that each school would be drug-free, safe, and nonviolent.1 The formulation of standards and the measurement of performance were intended to tidy up a messy system and to make teachers and school administrators truly accountable. The aim was then, and is today, to systematize and standardize so that the public will know which schools are performing well and which are not. There were to be then, and there are today, payments and penalties for performance. America is one of the few nations in which responsibility for schools is not under the aegis of a national ministry of education. Although we have a federal agency, the U.S. Department of Education, the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution indicates that those responsibilities that the Constitution does not assign explicitly to the federal government belong to the states (or to the people). And since the Constitution makes no mention of education, it is a responsibility of the states. As a result, we have 50 departments of education, one for each state, overseeing some 16,000 school districts that serve 52 million students in more than 100,000 schools. In addition, each school district has latitude for shaping education policy. Given the complexity of the way education is organized in the U.S., it is understandable that from one perspective the view looks pretty messy and not altogether rational. Furthermore, more than a few believe that we have a national problem in American education and that national problems require national solutions. The use of highly rationalized procedures for improving schools is a part of the solution. I mention the concept of rationalization because I am trying to describe the ethos being created in our schools. I am trying to reveal a world view that shapes our conception of education and the direction we take for making our schools better. Rationalization as a concept has a number of features. First, it depends on a clear specification of intended outcomes.2 That is what standards and rubrics are supposed to do. We are supposed to know what the outcomes of educational practice are to be, and rubrics are to exemplify those outcomes. Standards are more general statements intended to proclaim our values. One argument for the use of standards and rubrics is that they are necessary if we are to function rationally. As the saying goes, if you don't know where you're headed, you will not know where you have arrived. In fact, it's more than knowing where you're headed; it's also knowing the precise destination. Thus the specification of intended outcomes has become one of the primary practices in the process of rationalizing school reform efforts. Holding people accountable for the results is another. Second, rationalization typically uses measurement as a means through which the quality of a product or performance is assessed and represented. Measurement, of course, is one way to describe the world. Measurement has to do with determining matters of magnitude, and it deals with matters of magnitude through the specification of units. In the United States, the unit for weight is pounds. In Sweden or the Netherlands, it is kilograms. …

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This essay describes some of the primary features of educational criticism, an arts-based approach to qualitative inquiry. We first examine the aims of this approach, focusing on its potential to heighten our perceptions of the classroom. We next discuss four dimensions of educational criticism: descriptive (intended to vividly render the qualities that constitute an educational performance or product); interpretative (represented in the conceptual frameworks that allow critics to account for the attributes and patterns of interaction they have observed); normative (involving a process of articulating those values that inform conceptions of goodness within a given domain); and thematic (concerned with the utility of extracting some type of general understanding, image, principle, or lesson that transcends the particular of an individual case). Finally, we address questions of rigor as they apply to educational criticism and other forms of qualitative research. Specifically, we identify three criteria (consensual validation, structural corroboration, and referential adequacy) appropriate for assessing the credibility of such work. In suggesting criticism as one potential model for educational inquiry, we hope to encourage those researchers who seek to create compelling and richly textured accounts of current classroom practice.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsElliot W. Eisner Elliot W. Eisner is a professor of education and art, School of Education, Stanford University, Stanford ca 94305‐3096, USA. He is president of the American Educational Research Association. He is author of many books, including the recent The Enlightened Eye: Qualitative Inquiry and the Enhancement of Educational Practice (Macmillan, 1991).

Journal of Art & Design EducationVolume 8, Issue 2 p. 153-166 Current Issues in Art and Design Education: Art Education Today: a Look at its Past and an Agenda for the Future ELLIOT W. EISNER, ELLIOT W. EISNERSearch for more papers by this author ELLIOT W. EISNER, ELLIOT W. EISNERSearch for more papers by this author First published: June 1989 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1476-8070.1989.tb00456.xCitations: 4AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume8, Issue2June 1989Pages 153-166 RelatedInformation

Museum education has been an integral function of art museums in America since their inception. Indeed, our most venerable institutions call attention to the importance of education in their founding charters. Yet despite this responsibility, there remain significant unresolved questions about how best to organize and conduct the enterprise of museum education. A spectrum of opinion exists for every important issue: Whose responsibility is it in the art museum to conceive and carry out an educational program? What are the best ways to help audiences have meaningful encounters with works of art? How can we find out what different viewers need to enhance

Journal of Art & Design EducationVolume 5, Issue 1-2 p. 57-67 The Role of the Arts in Cognition and Curriculum ELLIOT W. EISNER, ELLIOT W. EISNER USASearch for more papers by this author ELLIOT W. EISNER, ELLIOT W. EISNER USASearch for more papers by this author First published: June 1986 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1476-8070.1986.tb00187.xCitations: 7AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Citing Literature Volume5, Issue1-2June 1986Pages 57-67 RelatedInformation