Cooking to teach fractions followed by a test asking students to shrink or expand the recipe, to show that knowledge had been conveyed would be keeping with this approach. For Eisner, our ability to know is based in our ability to construct valuable and real-life meaning from experiences in a coherent fashion.

             Despite his advancement of the importance of connoisseurship and criticism, Eisner began his own education as a teacher in an egalitarian setting. While in college Elliot Eisner worked with African American boys in the American Boys Commonwealth in the neighborhood where he grew up. He said later that this confirmed his view that there must be a solid aesthetic behind art education and a better exploration of art"s historical context. Approaches which simply gave children arts materials in the hope that their creativity might flow resulted in programs "with little or no structure, limited artistic content and few meaningful aims" and were ultimately patronizing in their approach to students ability to gain useful knowledge that would gain them advancement in life. (Smith, 2005) .

             From his bureaucratic experiences, Eisner also began to frown upon the stress on teacher"s "team meetings," which he said discouraged effective praxis and only encouraged talk amongst educators. He said such communal sharing of knowledge is useless if the theories that are generated cannot be used to help students. For example, hearing about a colleagues" problems teaching decimals may be instructive, and help all teacher draw on a range of techniques, but a good educator is one who can combine the different techniques and improvise regarding the particular situation and set of student"s needs. Eisner believed that teachers needed to work together, but they also needed to accept criticism from principles and administrators in the classroom, in terms of the results generated by their efforts-just like students should not be so protected from criticism in assessments of their qualitative and quantitative work, either!.