Elliot Eisner, _The Arts and the Creation of Mind_ (2002)

Elliot Eisner, Professor of both Art and Education at Stanford University, asserts that "Work in the arts is not only a way of creating performances and products; it is a way of creating our lives by expanding our consciousness, shaping our dispositions, satisfying our quest for meaning, establishing contact with others, and sharing a culture" (3).  Though this book is pedantic and academic in tone, I did glean some useful points.

Eisner cogently summarizes the various visions of arts education.  These are

1. Discipline-based art education: intended to help students gain the skills and imagination required for high-quality art performance; foster the ability to see and talk re: qualities of art; provide historical and cultural context for arts creation; and to consider questions regarding the values provided by art.
2. Visual culture: using art to help students learn to decode the values and ideas embedded in pop culture, as well as the fine arts.  Students read images as texts; also arts serve as a springboard for understanding diverse values and life conditions.  
3. Creative problem solving: the German Bauhaus, which operated from 1919 until 1932, exemplifies this approach: addressing social problems in technically efficient, as well as aesthetically-pleasing ways, marrying form and function.
4. Creative self-expression: the arts are a creative outlet for personal expression and development.
5. Arts education as preparation for the workplace: art facilitates the development of higher-level skills necessary in any field, including allocating resources; collaboration with others; finding, analyzing, and communicating information; operating complex systems of seemingly unrelated parts; and using technology.
6. The arts and cognitive development: "work in the arts contributes to the development of complex and subtle forms of thinking".  The arts can foster flexibility, promote tolerance for ambiguity, encourage risk-taking, and help people exercise judgment outside the sphere of rules (35). 
7. Using the arts to promote academic performance: the arts may boost academic performance in the so-called "basics".  Eisner seems to cast a critical eye on this vision, noting that other approaches could potentially result in equal, if not superior outcomes, and the danger such a vision poses to the role of arts in schools, if studies don't show either a clear or strong connection between the arts and academic performance.
8. Integrated arts: the arts are blended with other arts and non-arts curricula, usually for four reasons: providing insight into a particular time frame or culture; identifying similarities and differences between the arts; finding a common theme or idea that can be explored via the arts and other fields; and problemsolving, addressing a problem via several disciplines, including the arts. 

Eisner also notes what the arts teach, namely

• Attention to relationships between parts and the whole
• Flexible purposing: the ability to shift direction and potentially redefine one's aims when better options emerge.
• Using materials and a medium: materials mediate the aims and choices that individuals make.  Students need to learn techniques for working with the material and to understand the possibilities and limitations of that medium.
• Shaping form to create expressive content.
• Exercising imagination.
• Framing the world from an aesthetic perspective.
• Transforming qualities of experience into speech and text.

Finally, Eisner articulates art's lessons for educators:

• There can be more than one answer to a question and more than one solution to a problem; variability is okay.
• Form and content are intertwined.  
• The importance of imagination.
• Attending to relationships in one's work.
• Intrinsic satisfaction matters.
• Literal lnaguage and quantification are not the sole means by which human understanding is gained or represented.
• Gaining flexible purposefulness in one's work.