Elliot Eisner has spent the last forty years researching, thinking and writing about some of the enduring issues in arts education, curriculum studies and qualitative research. He has compiled a career-long collection of his finest work including extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings and major theoretical contributions and brought them together in a single volume. Starting with a specially written introduction, which gives an overview of Eisner's career and contextualises his selection, the chapters cover a wide range of issues including:

* children and art
* the use of educational connoisseurship
* aesthetic modes of knowing
* absolutism and relativism in curriculum theory
* education reform and the ecology of schooling
* the future of education research.