I recently attended a lecture at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia. Credit for the vast majority of the following ideas goes to Eisner, with my thanks. This is profoundly powerful. Additionally, the policies on school development will contribute to the ways in which our students' minds develop.
Schools offer curricula, or content, and teaching offers a process for contextualizing that content.
Schools also have their own unique cultures. When we look at the current emphasis on the standards movement and accountability based on testing, it seems to me, and to Eisner, that the arts are more needed than ever. For one thing, they imply that there is one correct answer to important problems. If we really want children to value strength in diversity, if we mean that we value different learning styles and multiple intelligences, then we must think about what we are teaching when we constantly give tests whose questions have one right answer. The arts offer an alternative.