The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method Relates, Self, Subject, World

I present here an article published originally in 1984 in issue #601 of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known--an international periodical edited with tremendous scholarship and justice to people by the Chairman of Education of Aesthetic Realism, Ellen Reiss.  This article is a portion of a paper I gave at a public seminar on education at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York City.

At the time, I was teaching at Mabel Dean Bacon Vocational High School on 15th Street and 1st Avenue.  This school has since become the Manhattan Comprehensive Night High School.  I was also teaching English out of license to 9th and 10th grade students. In this paper I illustrate how the opposites, beautifully made one in the subject, explain the most ordinary and tormenting questions of our lives.  When I was so fortunate to be a student in classes with Eli Siegel in the 1970's, he asked me questions about the opposites of rest and motion, wandering and stoppage and I was able to know myself better and see myself in relation to music and geography.  This principle by Mr. Siegel is at the core of the success of the Aesthetic Realism Teaching method: "The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites."  It can end forever that dreaded question teachers hear: "Why do I have to learn this?"

Education: Self, Subject, World
By Rosemary Plumstead

In "Aesthetic Realism: Some Central Notions," as Eli Siegel describes education he is also explaining what every student hopes for: "Education, principally, is the pleasant finding out of how things can help us know who we are as we see them."  What child wouldn't want to go to school if he thought he could have a good time knowing himself through seeing what the world is?

Rest and Motion

As a student I did not see the subjects I studied as having anything to do with the world I went out into after school.  I didn't know that as I studied, for instance, the living patterns of Native Americans, I was studying opposites central in my own life.  Yet I remember the thrill I felt learning that the Iroquois Indians of New York lived in longhouses which were made of wood and were stationary, while the Plains Indians lived in tepees made of animal skins, more suited to nomadic life.

Many years later, in the first Aesthetic Realism class taught by him that I attended, Eli Siegel asked me: "Do you have a fight between wandering and stoppage?"  I sure did.  I had a hard time sitting still in school and giving attention.  I talked constantly to my neighbors, and though I sometimes did class assignments with a feverish enthusiasm, I would give up if I couldn't understand quickly.  (I probably would have been labelled ADD).  I would wander to the wastebasket or bathroom. In high school, I often slept in a class or wandered the halls.  This difficulty was agonizing to me as it is to the thousands of young people who feel now what I did then.  It troubles students today so much that keeping the hallways clear is a major security problem in New York schools.  With Aesthetic Realism as the basis, students can learn through the Iroquois and Plains Indians, for instance, how painful opposites in themselves can serve the same purpose.

Separation and Junction

As a student, I felt a tremendous rift between what went on at home and what I learned in school. Many young people feel this.  I found it hard to concentrate in a class after having angry words with my father at home.  The world seemed fragmented, and that made me feel I couldn't sit still. This term I am teaching English to ninth and tenth grade students at Mabel Dean Bacon Vocational High School.  When I asked students if they felt their lives were more whole or in pieces, they said, "pieces."  One student put what she felt this way: "All the classes I go to during the day seem different, and when I leave I don't remember things.  It gets all mixed up in my mind."

Students feel the world is not coherent and can't be liked: they feel justified in having contempt for the educational system, including their teachers.  I have seen students learn better, remember more, when the true relation among self, subject, world is seen.

In an Aesthetic Realism class, Eli Siegel asked me, "What is the large matter concerned in the life of everyone?  The relation of separation and junction.  Music tries to be spacious and rich. Have you sometimes had an accelerated fit?"  "Yes," I said.  I remember running around the gym for hours, feeling frantic.  I would sometimes talk so fast, one world would trip over another. I would also get so knocked out, every movement and word was an effort.

Mr. Siegel showed me that boredom is related to frantic activity: both arise from a bad relation of separation and junction.  He said, "When we want to be 'blah,' we do one thing after another and see no connection."  He used geography to explain how, in the physical world, things are far apart and also close. "Take Wyoming and Montana, for example.  The towns are far apart. In New England you feel it's all one town.  If you look at music, sometimes notes are very close, and sometimes very spaced in a measure.  Is there a fight in you between bunching things and being leisurely?"

Throughout the thirty years I used this method, I saw that the opposites are the relation among the world, any subject, and ourselves.  Seeing this can change the apathy and anger in our schools.

The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method Shows Every Fact Has Meaning!

Lesson on Blood
The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method
By Rosemary Plumstead

Author's Note: The following description is from the website of the not-for-profit Aesthetic Realism Foundation (www.aestheticrealism.org): 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 40 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.

It is in these definitive principles that Eli Siegel, the founder of Aesthetic Realism, gave teachers the basis for this method:
(1)  "The purpose of education is to like the world." (Self and World, p. 5).
(2)  Contempt — "the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it" — is the greatest interference to learning and the fundamental cause of all injustice.
(3)  "The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites."  This magnificent principle is the means to understand every subject — reading, writing, mathematics, history, science — to see its beauty, and relate it to students' lives.
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Every Fact Has Meaning

Before studying Aesthetic Realism, while I wanted my students to learn, I myself didn't see the facts I was teaching as having large meaning and excitement.  It was no wonder the young people I taught were bored or furious most of the time, and that I too was frustrated and angry.

Now, after 30 years of using it in my classroom, I am proud to say the Aesthetic Realism teaching method succeeds because it gracefully ends the mind deadening rift between fact and meaning.  When my students--including those who had repeatedly failed, or who were bored and cynical-—see that facts we study in science show the world has an exciting, sensible structure and that all this is related to themselves, they see the subject as having big meaning.  It is the grandeur of this method that through it not only do failing students succeed, but that students who seemed distressed, angry—-even cruel--also change.  That second aspect is what I will mainly speak of here through a science lesson on the composition of blood.

The students in my classes were from different neighborhoods and backgrounds.  Some were fairly affluent, but many were from families struggling to make ends meet.  Like other young people in programs for the "gifted" and "talented," many had used their facility to learn facts for an exam and get praises for it.  They were jaded; they felt they knew everything and it didn't amount to much. Meanwhile, there were some who, though placed in an honors class, failed in the first marking period and were worried.

In September as I looked out at these young people, I saw many faces that were outwardly cool, even expressionless.  Then there were students like Jeremy (the students' names have been changed), a very bright young man who constantly tried to outdo others.  When Anthony, who sat next to him, would start to speak, Jeremy would laugh and make fun of him unmercifully.  But right after, Jeremy would be in such a muddle that he was literally unable to answer the simplest question.  Kelly and Randall-—two art students-—rarely looked up during lessons because they were constantly drawing in their notebooks.  When other students would comment, Kelly often sneered, looking at Randall and rolling her eyes in disgust.  Meanwhile, this young woman who acted so sure of herself was so ill-at-ease with other students that she refused to go to the lunchroom.  Her mother told me with great concern that when Kelly came home from school she would be tearful, not want to eat, and be unable to sleep.

In the two years that I have taught honors classes, the number of students I have heard of who are being treated for sleep disorders, who see therapists and take anti-depressants, has affected me tremendously.  When students excel in school and use this to have less feeling for everything including other people; when they think they have conquered the world by conquering a subject, they are having contempt. A nd the result is large emptiness and agitation.  I wanted these students to see that the facts of science are alive, meaningful, and are evidence that the world can be respected-—that they themselves were not in some exclusive world where they could feel superior yet also be so pained.  And I knew the Aesthetic Realism teaching method was the means to let them see this.

Reality's Opposites Are in Our Blood

As part of our study of the human transport system, there is a lesson about blood.  I asked them: "When you think of blood, what comes to your mind?" "Fear," Jamal said; "I think of being injured." "I get faint when I see blood," Milagros added.  "My hope," I said, "is that the more we know about blood, the more meaning it will have for us."

I then read the following from The Incredible Machine, published by the National Geographic Society:

"The body's river retains an age-old tie to Earth's waters.... In our blood flows the same balance of minerals and salts that existed in ancient Cambrian seas, a heritage half a billion years old."

"That's astounding," Monique said.

I asked, "What gives these facts such meaning?  Do we feel that something going on inside us, in our own intimate circulatory system, has a relation to the earth and seas outside of us?"

Abdul said with excitement: "That's really something-—the minerals in our blood are still the same as a half a billion years ago!"  "How does that make you feel?"  I asked the class. Kelly was really attentive now, and said with a smile, "Old, but good."  "Does it make you feel proud?" I asked.  "Yes," Nicki said.  "It means we go back very far, and I like that."  I asked the class, "Does this fact show that in every person there is an amazing relation of past and present?  After all, it took millions of years for reality to get to each one of us sitting here."

Already, through the opposites of what's inside the self and the outside world, and the present and past, there was a different feeling in the classroom about facts, and also about one's fellow human beings.  And as the lesson proceeded, my students became much more attentive.

We then studied this fact: all life, beginning as one celled microscopic organisms, arose in the primal seas.  It was easy for food, minerals, oxygen, and wastes to pass into and out of these single celled organisms.  But as organisms came to be more complex, multi-cellular, it was necessary to get nutrients and oxygen to interior cells and remove wastes from them.   We learned that "an inner stream evolved to nourish every cell."  That "inner stream," originating in the primal seas, was now snugly inside the body, and over time became our highly developed transport system, with 60 thousand miles of vessels carrying blood to 60 trillion cells!  My students who had earlier been impassive and bored were now filled with wonder.  Learning was becoming a great pleasure.

As my students saw those opposites of inside and outside, past and present, in blood, they began to realize that they had a relation to the beginnings of the world and to people they had never met.  The realization countered a tremendous feeling of snobbishness that in turn hurt them so much — of the false way they had gotten their distinction, through feeling superior and essentially unrelated to other people.  I told them I learned from Aesthetic Realism that the world is the other half of ourselves. Our study of blood showed that this is not only a beautiful idea but also a tangible fact.

Red Blood Cells: Stability & Change

In "The Incredible Machine," we read the following about red blood cells, or erythrocytes:

"Launched into the bloodstream, each (red) cell will live only four months ... before returning to the bone marrow to die.  In the second it takes to turn a page of this book, we will each lose about 3 million red cells.  Yet during that second the marrow will have produced the same number."

Kelly and Randall were listening carefully, no longer drawing in their notebooks.  And Ronald said as he turned a page of his notes, "I just lost and gained 3 million red blood cells. That's incredible!"  I asked, "Do you think this is a thrilling instance of how the body has stability and change, old and new?" "Yes," Jeremy said.  "Red blood cells are dying and being born every second — that's change — but the number stays constant."

Young people, like teachers, can feel that these opposites of stability and change are painfully separate in their lives.  There can be terrifying financial instability at home as a parent suddenly loses a job; some students have lived in different foster homes; others live with one parent during the week and another on the weekend.  And young people feel they themselves are volatile.  They can change moods suddenly.  These same students can feel the world is boring, too stable , and that their lives are filled with routine and they're stuck.

Seeing how beautifully stability and change work together as red blood cells expire and new ones are born, my students were very excited.  I asked, "Do you think we see the persons close to us as having what the red blood cells have—a constant relation of something new and surprising, and something old and familiar?"  "No," said Jeremy, who had earlier mocked other students and felt so dull.  "I think we see them as 'same old, same old."  I asked, "Is it true that every day, like the bloodstream, a person adds to himself or herself new thoughts and feelings about the world?"  "It's true!" Angel said.

He had been failing at the beginning of the year, and his mother had told me she was very concerned about his being so withdrawn and losing interest in school.  This was the first time he had participated in class.  As the term progressed, the students changed dramatically.  Jeremy stopped mocking Anthony, and began to encourage others rather than ridicule them.  Kelly started listening, became much more at ease, and the sneering episodes between her and Randall stopped.  Her mother told me she's so grateful that Kelly no longer comes home crying, is sleeping much better, and has really changed.  In January, 100 percent of the class passed the course.  Jeremy wrote that because of the lessons on blood, "I look at other human beings and I think, 'They have the same thing I have. I even treat people nicer... because I care about people more. They have something that is so important in their bodies.'"

I want the students, teachers, and parents of America to know this beautiful, logical, kind teaching method.
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Rosemary Plumstead is a retired science teacher from Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of the Arts in New York City. This paper, first presented at a public seminar on education given at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, is published in its entirety in "The Philippines Post."