Eisner, Elliot

Educational Degrees and Academic Positions

Eisner's interests in arts education and curriculum studies were evident early in his career. In 1954, he received his bachelor of arts degree from Roosevelt University in art and education and a year later a master of science degree (in art education) from the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Eisner taught art for 2 years at a Chicago high school and then successfully pursued a master of arts in education (1958) and a doctorate of philosophy in education (1962). Both of these degrees were from the University of Chicago, where he also taught art at the Laboratory School. After a 3-year stint as assistant professor at the University of Chicago, Eisner was recruited by Stanford University as associate professor of education and art. There his career flourished for over four decades until his retirement in 2006 as Lee Jacks professor of education and professor of art.

Primary Achievements in Curriculum Theory

For over four decades, in his writing, teaching, and public speaking, Eisner's emphasis on the aesthetic in curriculum and schooling ran counter to dominant scientistic, industrial, and technocratic currents.

Early on, Eisner challenged the behavioral objectives movement of the 1960s, objecting to the notion that all intended learning outcomes must be formulated by curriculum planners in advance of student engagement in an educational activity. Initially labeling his alternative to behavioral objectives as expressive objectives, Eisner later coined the term expressive outcomes. An expressive outcome was the result of an engagement in an expressive activity, within which emerge student purposes. Eisner argued that the unpredictable, emergent outcomes of such activities would and should vary in accordance with the cultural and personal background of the individual student.

A similar argument was later found in his objections to the standards movement that swept the United States, beginning in the 1980s. For the educational community and general population, the definitions of an educational standard were usually elastic, fluid, and vague. Eisner, however, called attention to the origins of the term within the scientific management movement begun by businessman and consultant Frederick Taylor and extended to the field of education through the work of Franklin Bobbitt. Bobbitt equated curricular standards with the standardized measurements of physical objects (steel railroad rails, in particular). For Eisner, therefore, standards (like objectives) implied a rigid, static conformity in learning that was harmful to the development of the imaginative faculties of students and to what he called productive idiosyncrasy. Without this quality, he contended, students were less likely to contribute productively to society in a manner suited to their unique personalities.

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