This book of essays sets forth Eisner's theories of aesthetic intelligence, or theories that rethink the connections among art, literacy, research, and evaluation. The book is divided into four sections of four essays each. The first section, "Cognition and Representation," explains how the process of education expands and deepens the kinds of meaning people have in their lives. Schools must, therefore, help children learn to encode and decode the many forms of meaning they encounter--visual, auditory, linguistic, kinesthetic, or mathematical. The essays included in this section are: "Rethinking Literacy,""The Celebration of Thinking,""Aesthetic Modes of Knowing," and "Cognition and Representation: A Way To Pursue the American Dream?" The second section, "The Arts and Their Role in Education," focuses on defending the arts in schools as activities that engage the mind and as activities that have a broader educational relevance than purely appealing to human feeling. The essays include: "What Arts Taught Me About Education,""The Education of Vision,""The Misunderstood Role of the Arts in Human Development," and "Does Experience in the Arts Boost Academic Achievement?" In the third section, "Rethinking Educational Research," explains the nature of knowledge and the arts and humanities as resources with which to think about and conduct educational research. The essays include: "The Meaning of Alternative Paradigms for Practice,""Forms of Understanding and the Future of Educational Research,""Reshaping Assessment in Education," and "What Artistically Crafted Research Can Help Us Understand About Schools." The final section, "The Practice and Reform of Schools," takes an organic or "ecological" approach to school reform. The essays include: "Educational Reform and the Ecology of Schools,""Standards for American Schools: Help or Hindrance?""What a Professor Learned in the Third Grade," and "Preparing Teachers for the Twenty-First Century." (Contains 137 references.) (JMD)