Art, Science and Aesthetic Realism

For the last six years my colleague Donita Ellison and I have given presentations on the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method and how it relates the beauty in art and science. The basis is this great principle by Eli Siegel, "The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites." We have had a wonderful time showing how the beauty to be found in the natural world has the same source as the beauty to be found in art--the opposites!

Since we both taught at LaGuardia High School of the Arts, it wasn't uncommon for my science students to have basic printmaking or ceramics with Donita Ellison. Early in the day they might learn how the rapid mitotic cell divisions in embryonic development are a stunning relation of the opposites of sameness and change. The full complement of chromosomes containing DNA needed for all life functions are present in a single cell at the moment of fertilization. This information is passed on through these divisions, to every one of the 60 trillion cells that ultimately make up a human being. When a cell divides in a person of 80, it has in its nucleus the information that was present at the moment of conception! Students are thrilled by this.

These same opposites--sameness and change--are also present in the art of molding clay. An artist begins with a single, amorphous lump of clay that is given shape and meaning through his or her work. Within the end product is the early lump of clay, changed through kneading and molding and baking! Mr. Siegel has defined art as "willed beauty."

These opposites, so beautifully one in the world and in art, are present in the ordinary, every day turbulent lives. Students, for example, can feel the world is boring and things are too much the same and so they can look for excitement in ways that are sometimes dangerous. They can also feel the world changes on them suddenly and certainly can't be depended upon. Parents might go through a divorce and make for changes in the lives of their children that are unexpected and painful. Children can suddenly be displaced by a fire or a death in the family making the world feel unfriendly and not to be trusted. Teachers can also feel their lives have too much sameness and routine and yearn to see the world and people, including those close to them, with new freshness!

Meanwhile, as difficult and heart-wrenching as these situations are, students can learn through the subjects they study that the same world that can confuse them also has a structure of opposites--a beautiful relation of sameness AND change that is permanent! The world may not be run right or managed fairly, but it is made well! Donita Ellison and I have had the pleasure of showing this great fact to students in our classes and to teachers in the many presentations we have given together over the years. I look forward to giving many more!

You can visit the Terrain Gallery's website to find out more about the Siegel Theory of Opposites in relation to art. I am also a member of The Art and Science Collaboration, Inc. whose rich website is worth a visit.

Through the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method Knowledge Opposes Anger--& Students Learn!

On Thursday, November 1, 2007 there will be a public seminar given on the success of the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York City. As a teacher who used this method for more than 33 years in New York City public high schools, I know how how greatly this method enables students to learn with enthusiasm and grace. I am pleased to present here the announcement for this seminar, sent to educators near and far.

The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method enables students on every grade level to learn successfully and become kinder people! Teachers who use this method will describe lessons from their own classrooms, and show how through it students not only pass standardized tests, but love knowledge--and this includes young people who were cynical, angry, and had just about given up on the goodness of their minds.

The Purpose of Education

Eli Siegel, the great American educator and founder of Aesthetic Realism, explained the purpose of education: it is "to like the world through knowing it." He also showed that contempt--"the addition to self through the lessening of something else"--is the chief cause of a student's failure to learn. And contempt for the world and other people is also the cause of the violence that has made America's schools dangerous.

Young people feel cheated and are furious. Many feel there's no future for them. Many see their parents desperately worried about being able to feed and house the family. Students also feel disrespected, having to go to school buildings that are in disrepair and where there aren't enough textbooks. The feeling, "Why should I bother learning this stupid subject in a world as mean and crazy as this one?" has intensified.

Meanwhile, inwardly, young people are screaming, "Please don't give up on me!" They're thirsty for convincing evidence that the world can be liked, honestly respected, without leaving out any of the facts.
The Aesthetic Realism teaching method resoundingly meets this hope--through the following principle:

"The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites."

An Instance

For example, students are excited to see, as they study the human immune system in a high school science class, how it puts together general and specific, for and against. They learn that the immune system can respond by sending a general force of white blood cells to defend the body at the site of a paper cut, splinter, burn. And there are also white blood cells that seek out and destroy very specific disease-causing agents in our bodies. These blood cells are for us by being against pathogens that take up residence within us.

Students want to be proud of how they are for AND against the world. As they see these opposites together beautifully in the immune system, they respect reality; they remember the facts of the subject. They also see that they can be for the world--have true respect for it--and at the same time be against injustice, be accurate, useful critics. And this makes them proud and much kinder.

On November 1st, you'll see the educational meth0d that meets the fervent hopes of students across the nation!

"It is my professional opinion that this is the world's finest teaching method! It can solve the crisis in education." --Jeffrey Williams, science teacher, PS/MS #37, Bronx

"The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method changes the pervasive dullness, cynicism, and lack of interest in both students and teachers--and makes classrooms dynamic with real learning and pleasure!
--Leila Rosen, English teacher, Bayside HS, Queens

Speakers: Lori Colavito (3rd grade, Southampton Elementary School)
Avi Gvili (communication arts, IS 7SI)
Rosemary Plumstead (science, NYC HS, retired)
Patricia Martone (ESL, PS 134M)
Christopher Balchin (social studies. Brooklyn Academy of Science & the Environment)
Arnold Perey (instructor, the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method)

Aesthetic Realism Foundation 141 Greene Street NYC 10012 212-777-4490

Aesthetic Realism and the Answer to Racism

In recent news headlines, the case of the 'Jena Six' has sparked much intense emotion throughout the country. That in this day and age we have young people hanging nooses across tree branches without any real sense of the horror of such an act and the depth of emotion this can make for in a person of color, is astonishing. Aesthetic Realism explains the cause of racism at its very beginning in the human self. It is the desire for contempt: "the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it." It is also important to say that the brutal beating later endured by the young white man was also motivated by contempt. Eli Siegel, the founder of Aesthetic Realism said, "contempt has to be studied if man is to be kind."

As an educator for more than three decades in New York City public high schools, I saw thousands of instances in which student's made less of one another. The thing they have in common is the unjust hope to build oneself up falsely by lessening the meaning of a person. One student calls another "stupid." A student who learns with ease asks another who struggles and who is hiding his or her test paper results, "what did you get?" Cliques form in the cafeteria that are snobbish and exclusive. I've heard students say with great scorn, "it smells in here," after a bi-lingual class had just left! To my great shame I remember making fun in the 1970's of the way my Hispanic students spoke spanish. I would not have admitted then that I was prejudiced because it didn't go along with my picture of myself as a "nice" person.

I later learned from Aesthetic Realism that this prejudice began with a way of seeing the world and a contempt for difference that hurt my life and had me dislike myself. Seeing this made it possible for me to change, to be a critic of myself and have the conscious hope to respect my students. The difference this made in the atmosphere in my classroom was like night and day!

I want my readers to know that there is a book titled, "Aesthetic Realism and the Answer to Racism," written by Alice Bernstein and Others and published by Orange Angle Press in 2004. It is, in my opinion, a definitive text on the subject of racism as it describes what Eli Siegel and Aesthetic Realism explain about the cause of racism and how it can end. I am proud to be among the authors telling how through the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method prejudice is opposed. Every classroom teacher should read this book!

The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method Relates Sports, Dance, Biology!

I began my career in education teaching health and physical ed on the high school level in 1971. In 1974, when my study of Aesthetic Realism began, I started to test the Aesthetic Realism method--how are opposites made one in the sports I loved all my life and in folk dance, which I loved to teach? I saw how in volleyball, the set pass put together delicacy and gentleness as a person's fingertips meet the ball. Meantime, the spike has great power with precision. In order to hold a bat and hit a ball successfully a player has to have a grip that is at once firm and flexible, and a stance that is alert yet relaxed. In every team sport there needs to be a good relation of the individual and the collective, self-assertion and yielding to others.

Continuity and discontinuty, hop and glide, separation and junction are one in folk dances from different countries. At first, students would moan and groan at the idea of learning such uncool dances. Then, lo and behold, they didn't want to stop. "The world, art, and self explain each other:" Eli Siegel explained, "each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites." Opposites such as: power and delicacy, firmness and flexibility, continuity and discontinuity, so gracefully and beautifully put together in a sport or dance, are opposites every person, at any age yearns to put together. As students saw these opposites could be made one in the subjects they studied, they had more hope for their own lives.

In 1990, while on a sabattical, I obtained the necessary credits to teach science full time. I particularly loved teaching anatomy and physiology. The human body is a stunning relation of opposites--many and one, power and delicacy, junction and separation, firm and flexible--the same opposites present in sports, the dance and the turbulent self of every person. Many students had difficulty learning about blood and showed tremendous fear when as we began to study the subject. However, when they saw the aesthetics in our blood, their fear changed to interest. Some of what they learned is present in this article title, "Lesson in Blood" published in the Philippine Post.

Through the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method, Interest Wins, Cynicism Loses--in Students & Teachers! by Leila Rosen

This article, published in "The English Record" of the New York State English Council, illustrates the beauty to be found in grammar, particularly in the use of adjectives. Students can find grammar boring, but through this Aesthetic Realism principle by Eli Siegel, they can change the way they see different subjects: "The purpose of education is to like the world through knowing it." Miss Rosen writes, "My students came to love adjectives as they saw that a world that has adjectives in it is a world that is interesting." And she goes on to show, that in time, her students ability to write improved enormously. Learn a new and exciting approach to language arts through the Aesthetic Realism Method.

An Aesthetic Realism Seminar Paper on Environmental Science

"The movie industry was greatly surprised last year that “The March of the Penguins” surpassed in viewers many “top rated” films released at the time. This shows with resounding clarity that when people go to the movies, we not only want to be entertained, but educated and strengthened."
This is how the paper, published in The South Carolina Black News begins. To read the rest of it, click here.

Aesthetic Realism and the Meaning of Good Will by Rosemary Plumstead

In the more than 30 years that I have studied the philosophy of Aesthetic Realism, I am grateful, both personally and professionally, for learning the meaning of good will. Eli Siegel defined good will as: "...the desire to have something else stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful." (TRO 121)

Having the ability to ask myself at any given moment, as a wife, a friend, a daughter, and very much as a teacher: "Am I having good will for this person?" or, "What would good will be in this situation?" has made the difference in my life between a pervasive shame I felt years ago because I did not always have the good effect on people I hoped to have, and the pride I feel today. I was able to think consciously about what good will was for my students as I prepared a science lesson and thought about questions I would ask them, questions that had them feel deeply comprehended, more composed. They were very grateful for this.

As much as I had a big desire to be kind years ago, I also saw kindness as weak; it left me, I thought, vulnerable to being hurt and used by people. Aesthetic Realism sees good will, the real thing, as a oneness of opposites--toughness and tenderness, criticism and praise, assertion and yielding.

As an educator for more than 30 years, this knowledge was invaluable to me. Every teacher, whether he or she articulates it or not, wants to have a good effect on his or her students. As I said, I certainly did. Many years ago it was through teaching that I felt most expressed and most approached having the kind of good effect that I wanted to have. And yet, there were things working in me which I didn't understand--anger, suspicion of people, a false notion of strength--that stopped me from being the person and teacher I hoped to be.

I learned from Aesthetic Realism that there are two desires working in us all the time. Our deepest, most fundamental desire is to like the world, have honest respect for it and for people as a means of thinking well of ourselves. When we are untrue to this first desire, we rightly dislike ourselves. People feel they betray themselves daily and have no clue why. It is because there is in us as well, a desire to feel important, to puff ourselves up falsely through contempt, which Mr. Siegel defined as: "The disposition in every person to think he will be for himself by making less of the outside world." Contempt is the cause of all injustice, small and large; it made for slavery, the holocaust and every day, ordinary injustice--such as a wife thinking to herself about her husband, "I know him," or a teacher saying to another teacher in the lunch room, "These kids are barbarians, they'll never learn!"

When I attended an Aesthetic Realism seminar in 1973 and first heard that a person's deepest desire was to like the world and be fair to it, I was thunderstruck because I had recalled saying to students in a health class, "Who'd want to bring kids into this world anyway?" "My God," I thought, "am I having a bad effect on my students?" I realized I had ways of seeing the world and people that interfered not only with my own self respect and happiness, but that my attitude to the world could possibly be showing itself in the classroom, where most consciously I wanted to be kind, useful and make students stronger.

That is clearly one of the big reasons I chose to look into Aesthetic Realism, which was not known at all at that time. I began having Aesthetic Realism consultations where I heard questions about how I saw the whole world: my parents, friends, my students, men and women, love, reading books, and so much more. I heard kind, critical questions of my contempt for things and people and what was brought out of me was my true self--a self whose deepest desire was to know and like the world; one that had been struggling in the dark looking for light. I came to care for art, music and poetry. I came to care for books more. I read Jane Eyre and learned about how a woman could be kind and strong in having good will for a man as she did for Rochester. I read Henry James' "Portrait of a Lady," where I saw that a man could see the mind of a woman with great respect, and want to be fair to her depths. I started seeing my father Dominick, with whom I had been furious, as a person to be known, understood, and used as a beginning point for liking the world, not fighting with it. I saw people with more respect and a desire to know and understand them. This certainly included my students. My teaching took on new life and purpose and I came to love even more the subjects of health and physical education, which I was teaching at the time. A love for science, which I hated in high school, grew in me so much that I became recertified to teach it after 20 years in the classroom.

I began to feel that real love could exist between a man and woman where both were made stronger. This is what I have felt in my marriage of 24 years to Reverend Wayne Plumstead, Pastor of Park United Methodist Church in Bloomfield, NJ and an Aesthetic Realism Consultant. I have a chance close up, day to day, to want to know the depths of a man and hope to have good will for him. For us, what Mr. Siegel called the "third partner" in every relation between two people--the world--takes on wide dimension because it includes an entire congregation of people who have hopes, dreams, disappointments, and life questions of their own that we both want to be fair to.

I had consultations once a week for 18 months. I drove into the city from the Bronx in rain, snow, sleet and hail to hear the deep, critical questions that penetrated me to my bone marrow. I felt for the first time in my life that three Aesthetic Realism Consultants--people who were then complete strangers to me--wanted to know what I felt to myself. They so much wanted me to be stronger that they were going to tell me the truth, not schmooze me. That is the magnificent good will I later experienced as I entered classes with Eli Siegel in 1975 to study to teach Aesthetic Realism. With a keenness and depth, sweetness and intensity, as well as critical good humor I was met by Mr. Siegel to my core. I was being known. I was named an Aesthetic Realism Consultant by Eli Siegel in 1978. This was one of the proudest moments of my life. I now have the privilege of teaching what I have learned and using my life, including my mistakes, to have the lives of other women and teachers stronger. What a gift!

I've used my best, most discerning mind on Aesthetic Realism, including the questions I heard in consultations and in classes with Mr. Siegel. At a time when Mr. Siegel thought I was answering questions too swiftly and without sufficient thought, he said to me, "I like very much seeing ladies, not yes ladies." He wanted me to be a critic of what I was hearing and really SEE! Good will," Mr. Siegel has said, "is the culmination of education." My education continues and my love and respect for Aesthetic Realism, Eli Siegel and the Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism, Ellen Reiss, with whom I now study in classes for consultants and associates, is rightly without limit.

I would now like to quote some passages from Issue #900 of the international journal The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, originally published in July, 1990 titled "The Might of Good Will." Had the press reported on Aesthetic Realism, this knowledge could have changed people's lives way back then. In the introductory comments by Class Chairman Ellen Reiss, she teaches the dear unknown friends she addresses about the Aesthetic Realism understanding of good will. She writes in the section: How Powerful is Ethics:

"Good will is the central thing in ethics. So far in history, ethics has been seen as weak, incapable of defeating evil. But the reason ethics has seemed ineffectual is that people haven't seen what it really is. Eli Siegel, in Aesthetic Realism, has made ethics real. He has shown that good will and ethics are as real as a sidewalk, and are not only powerful, but the greatest power in the world. "
And she continued in a section called "The Elevator Test"

"In his teaching of Aesthetic Realism, Eli Siegel described what he called the Elevator Test. It is evidence for the fact that when a choice between good will and ill will is made clear, really clear to people, they will always choose good will. The Elevator Test goes this way: You are in an elevator with a person you don't know, and you go up several floors together. You may never see the person again. Do you hope that you have had a good effect on him, a bad effect, or no effect whatsoever?

Every person answering honestly will say, A good effect. Eli Siegel showed that no one can stand the idea--if he really sees it--that he has left another person worse off; and the idea that we have no meaning at all for someone cannot please us. We can go on hurting a person only if we pretend to ourselves about it, make the hurt unreal, and see the person as not fully a person. The Elevator Test and the questions arising from it--How do you feel if you see you have left a person worse off?; How do you feel if a good effect has not come to a person through knowing you?--should be discussed in public forums, on television, in schools, with the discussion conducted by Aesthetic Realism consultants. Such discussion in America would make ethics real. It would change people inside. It would make for kindness as a person saw someone of a different race on a street or campus.

And she concludes: Good will is the oneness of care for ourselves and care for the world. It is the most critical, beautiful thing in man. "

It is my hope through what I have written, intensely personal and also impersonal, that good will as explained by Aesthetic Realism, be loved as a living thing in all of us and seen more and more as our true self expression.