The Intelligent Eye: Learning to Think by Looking at Art

by David N. Perkins

Attentive observation of art provides an excellent opportunity for better thinking, for the cultivation of the "art of intelligence." The arts are important in an educational setting, therefore, because they can cultivate important thinking strategies in children and adults alike. With carefully chosen illustrations, Perkins demonstrates how the reflective approach to art can develop broader, more adventurous, and clearer avenues of thought.

Genres: Art

95 pages, Paperback

First published July 21, 1994

About the author

David Perkins is a founding member of Harvard Project Zero, a basic research project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education investigating human symbolic capacities and their development. For many years, he served as co-director, and is now senior co-director and a member of the steering committee. Perkins conducts research on creativity in the arts and sciences, informal reasoning, problem solving, understanding, individual and organizational learning, and the teaching of thinking skills. He has participated in curriculum projects addressing thinking, understanding, and learning in Colombia, Israel, Venezuela, South Africa, Sweden, Holland, Australia, and the United States. He is actively involved in school change. Perkins was one of the principal developers of WIDE World, a distance learning model practitioners now embedded in programs at HGSE. He is the author of numerous publications, including fourteen authored or co-authored books. His books include; The Eureka Effect, about creativity; King Arthurs Round Table, about organizational intelligence and learning; Making Learning Whole, a general framework for deepening education at all levels; and Future Wise, about what's worth teaching for the contemporary era.

Reviews

[Rob · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book teaches critical thinking by instructing the reader how to view and analyze works of art. It's very helpful for those who have never had an art class or for those who don't understand art beyond the basics of what they see. Many paintings communicate deep philosophical truths or light satires, and it takes thinking time to draw these out. This book gives some strategies to do so, all the while arguing for art education in schools.

[Dawson Cole · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this for a class and um, interesting! and uh, adequate!
love how it pushes for the arts tho

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

The things that I liked about this book was to train myself to stop, look and really see what an artwork is, how it makes me feel and how the artists used the principles of art to convey his or her message. Trying to explain a visual artwork in words is difficult at times for me and this book helped give me tools to "translate" what I see visually into words.