Eisner - Yes!

I really enjoyed The Arts and Creation of Mind. Eisner’s theory of arts education meshes well with my study of philosophy of art – both hold that “art” is not the painting in a gallery or book on a shelf, but the whole realm of artistic thought and production – perceptual exploration. Closer to greenish than green, as Eisner put it.

I chose Eisner for this entry because I agreed with him so much, and I’ve actually found it hard to write, because just want to pull quotes and say “what he said!”

I was particularly taken with the section where he discusses the arts as language, in the sense of being a lens though which we experience everything else. They “make possible a certain quality of experience we call aesthetic.” He poses the question of how we could teach other subjects as “a process in which artistry is at work.” I think that’s a simply beautiful idea! In my experience, there absolutely is art in mathematics, science, history, athletics – in everything, really. Because I view art in the Kantian definition, being that which is purposive without being purposeful, it allows us to enjoy the parts of other disciplines whose usefulness is not readily apparent. We can enjoy the beauty of a balanced equation without knowing how it applies, we can enjoy the depth and complexity of cellular structure without knowing how it helps us cure a disease or develop a new crop. We can enjoy history as literature, instead of dismissing it as just some stuff that happened to people who aren’t alive anymore. None of this is a cheapening of other subjects, but a strengthening, I think.

In an ideal world, I think the practice of dividing school into subjects, core and otherwise, would be phased out. Perhaps this is partly a function of coming from a philosophy background – I have often joked that one can be a philosophy scholar simply by studying whatever one is passionate about, and calling it Philosophy of that.

References:

The arts and the creation of mind. Elliot W Eisner. Language Arts. Urbana: May 2003. Vol. 80, Iss. 5; pg. 340

The Critique of Judgement [1892]. Immanuel Kant. Translated with Introduction and Notes by J.H. Bernard (2nd ed. revised). London: Macmillan, 1914.