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There is no more important news than the fact that in classrooms where teachers use the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method, learning succeeds and students become truly kinder to each other!
For more than 25 years New York City public school teachers have tested this method — and we have seen many, many students, including young people who have been horribly deprived by the unjust economy, learn to read, learn arithmetic, history, art and science with excitement and ease — and stay in school.
And teachers have described their results and shared their knowledge in seminars, professional conferences, and articles since the 1970s.
Educators may attend workshops (every 2 weeks) and education seminars at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation. For those who are at a distance, there are other possibilities.
The Aesthetic Realism method succeeds because it shows students that every subject in the curriculum says something about the world and their own often-turbulent selves. Eli Siegel, founder of Aesthetic Realism, poet and educator, explained that:
1. "The purpose of education is to like the world through knowing it."
2. The greatest interference to learning is contempt, "the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it." It is the desire to have contempt that makes a student declare triumphantly, "This is boring!" and motivates teachers to make belittling comments about their students.
3. There is a difference between the way the world is managed and the way it is made. The injustice both economically and ethnically that so many children meet—depriving them of enough food, decent housing, and stable lives—arises from a way of managing resources and seeing people that is profoundly disrespectful.
Yet, Aesthetic Realism shows, the world itself has a structure that is beautiful and can honestly be liked. It is described in this landmark principle, stated by Mr. Siegel: "The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites."
Through the Aesthetic Realism method, students learn, for instance, that an algebraic equation like 3x+4=19 is a oneness of the known and unknown—as their parents, whom they may have summed up, also are. Young people studying geography see that a mountain—with solid base rising to a graceful peak—does what they are hoping to do: it is substantial and light, high and low at once—opposites they can feel are agonizingly separate in their moods. As students meet any subject through the Aesthetic Realism teaching method, they feel, "This is about the whole world, and it's about me!" They see the world with greater respect and welcome learning. They feel closer to other people, including those of very different backgrounds and skin tones, and they become kinder.
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