Aesthetic Realism and Education

2011-10-23T14:00:00.000-07:00

The Opposition to Bullying: The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method

2011-10-23T09:59:00.000-07:00

In the most recent issue of the international journl, The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, my colleague Zvia Ratz, formerly of Israel, tells of how, through her use of the Aesthetic Realism method, her students learned math with great success and also learned, through the subject, how to end bullying.

All across this country, there are state governments and local school systems that are scrambling to pass strong legislation to try to oppose bullying. New Jersey, my home state, just passed the strongest legislation in this country. You cannot mandate that one person respect another. A law cannot create in an individuals mind and heart, a way of seeing that truly respects and is just to another person. However, I saw for more than 30 years, in some of the toughest areas of New York City, that through the Aesthetic Realism method young people can learn AND become kinder, more truly aware of what other people deserve. The changes in my students, how their minds blossomed and their ethics came forth always moved me and made me proud to be able to stand in front of a classroom and call myself an educator. Read Zvia Ratz's paper and learn how this terrible and sometimes deadly cruelty among young people can finally end. http://www.aestheticrealism.org/tro1806.html

Education Seminar on the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method

2011-10-15T10:28:00.000-07:00

Don't miss the important public seminar, given by New York City teachers who use the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method as the basis of their lessons, and the success they will tell about. This seminar is for teachers, administrators, parents and any person interested in changing our education system for the better. Read the flyer for this seminar at: http://www.aestheticrealism.org/Education-Seminar-Learn-2011.pdf

Ethics and the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method

2011-06-05T16:08:00.000-07:00

I'm pleased to provide a link to a website, "Teach Peace Now," that features a portion of a science paper I wrote on the human immune system for presentation at a public seminar at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York. It was later published in "The Stanys Bulletin," the official publication of the New York State Science Teachers Association. The uniqueness and importance of the graceful way that ethics and education are related by the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method was noted by this organization. I'm very glad they felt that other teachers, interested in encouraging respect and good will among students in the classroom through the subject, would find it valuable.

The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method Opposes Bullying!

2011-02-25T08:21:00.000-08:00

I have been greatly affected by recent news reports of increased violence in our schools and cases of bullying that have turned deadly. In Massachusetts, a 15 year old young Irish immigrant named Phoebe Prince, living in the US less than a year, committed suicide after months of vicious bullying by schoolmates. Many of these youth are facing criminal charges for their part in her death. In Deerfield Beach, Florida, young Michael Brewer was doused with a flammable liquid by middle school students in his school and set on fire. These events and the cruelty that led up to them leave us speechless. How could one human being treat another with such cold, calculating indifference?

I have learned from Aesthetic Realism that the cause of all violence is the desire in a person to take away meaning from things and people standing for the outside world, have contempt for it, which Eli Siegel defined as: "the addition to self through the lessening of what is not oneself." So we make ourselves "falsely" more, by making less of what's not us. Clearly, these young people did not see the feelings of those individuals they harmed and tormented as REAL as their own! I have also learned that it is anger, changed to contempt, that is the source of this cruelty. It begins with a way of seeing the world, not an individual person. One individual is targetted as a means of defeating a world one sees as unkind, unfriendly, indifferent to oneself.

As a teacher of science for many years in New York City public high schools, I know that the Aesthetic Realism Method, which I used for 30 years as the basis of my teaching, enables students to learn happily and successfully. It also brings out and strengthens the desire in young people to be just to other people. I saw this day after day in some of the most jaded teens from some of the most economically hard-hit ares of New York. They want to be proud of how they meet the world and people. They want to be kind and also feel that they are strong. This method brings together education and ethics in a lively and deep way that evokes the very best in a young person of any age. You can see this vividly in a paper I am proud was publised recently in the international periodical, The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known .

Another example is this Environmental Science lesson I gave on biomes and the beautiful way that leaves are made. Students saw a structure in the world, through the opposites, enabling them to like the world more, learn the subject and oppose unjust anger they might have taken out on someone they didn't even know. Violence, perpetrated by young people, is NOT inevitable!

The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method: Anger Changes to Respect for Knowledge and People

2010-03-05T14:00:00.000-08:00

This paper was originally part of a public seminar given at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation in Manhattan in the spring of 2002. Participating were New York City teachers who presented, with evidence from their own classrooms, the enormous success of the Aesthetic Realism Method in teaching diverse subjects. It was published in The Science Teachers Bulletin in the Fall of 2007. I am personally grateful to the editor of this Journal, Kari Murad, for her encouragement and good will in publishing my work.

Aesthetic Realism was founded in 1941 by the American poet and educator, Eli Siegel. These crucial principles, stated by Mr. Siegel, are the basis of this teaching method: (1) "The purpose of education is to like the world" (Self and World). (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 student's lives.

The Aesthetics of the Human Immune System

For more than three decades I saw each day how beautifully the Aesthetic Realism teaching method succeeds, and how deeply it changes anger in students to respect for knowledge and people! I say this with even greater conviction after teaching young people at LaGuardia High School (I have since retired) in Manhattan during months that followed the horrific attack on the World Trade Center.

We were in school less than a week when word came that two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center. In the days that followed, despite their shock and understandable fear, my students came to school every day, including three who lost a family member in the attack. This was so, even though students had to travel on trains that were often delayed or detoured due to police activity.

Meanwhile, as the weeks went on, many of them also showed they were both furious at a world they saw as senseless and against them. A feeling of resignation set in, "It all comes to nothing so why should I knock myself out?" Some stopped doing homework and didn't study for exams. Farah said, "Why should I study, I probably won't live to see college." Tom Allen, who lived across the street from ground zero and had to leave his home, sat with a glazed look in his eyes. He wasn't doing homework and was failing tests. Kim Smith sat at her desk looking angry all the time. After failing a test, she'd say to me with desparation, "I study but I don't get this stuff." Jorge Ceballos often cut class and didn't speak when he came. Alexi was suspicious and angry at the way he said his classmates were looking at him, and would yell at them across the room.

As I looked at these young people and saw how minute by minute they were making up their minds about whether the world deserved their respect or whether they should be angry at everything or indifferent, I knew it was urgent for them to see, through the facts of biology, what I have come to see through my study of Aesthetic Realism: that the same world that can be chaotic and even terrifying has a permanent, sensible structure of opposites that is related to oneself.

I. The Immune System Is an Efficient and Beautiful Relation of "For and Against" and "General and Specific"!

In early December, I gave four lessons about this complex and wonderful aspect of the human body. I began by asking, "What do you know about the work of the immune system?" Several students raised their hands. Anita said, "It keeps us from getting sick all the time." "That is true," I said, and told the class, "The human immune system puts together wonderfully the opposites of general and specific, and for and against. It equips our bodies, to fight, with tremendous constancy, faithfulness, and even great ferocity, anything that threatens our survival - by sending a general force of white blood cells to defend a site - a burn, a splinter, even a paper cut; and it also sends cells that seek out and destroy specific microorganisms and disease-causing agents that might gain entry into our body." We first studied the general response.

I asked, "Which of our organs do you think is the body's first line of defense?" They weren't sure. Then, Takia, asked, "Is it our skin?" "Right," I said. "And how does our skin provide that defense?" "As long as you don't have a cut," Tom Allen noted, "bacteria can't get into the body." I was glad to see Tom interested in this, and not having that far away look for once. I said, "Let's think about how completely and effectively our skin covers us. It is amazingly impervious to microscopic organisms, which means it's beautifully against things that might harm us and for what strengthens us.

I asked, "If we do get a cut, and the first line of defense - the skin - is injured, what happens around the site of the injury?" Tom raised his hand again, saying, "It gets red." "It might get swollen," Jose added. This, I told them, is called the inflammatory response, which is an indication that our immune system is working to defend us.

This brought us to key players in the immune system within our bodies: the courageous white blood cells! I told the class "Our white blood cells are the work force of the immune system And first on the scene are the ones representing the general force." There are two of these cells that respond rapidly to any threat, and are both present in an inflammatory response, 1. the neutrophils and 2. the macrophages. We read from an article by Stephen S. Hall, "Innate Defenses That Hold the Fort."

The first cells to show up at the site of inflammation are the neutrophils. A microbe or a splinter, it makes no difference--if it's foreign, it attracts the immediate notice of these nonspecific cells. Like sandbaggers at a cresting river, neutrophils...try to contain the impending damage by walling off the infective agent before it floods into adjoining tissues. (P. 21)

I asked the class, "How does the work of the neutrophils put together for and against? Rashida, very excited, said, "They're trying to protect us from further invasion by isolating the problem." And we learned that as neutrophils work to contain the threat, they also send out a general distress signal to the body for help.

Next, we read about the macrophages--also quick to arrive at the injured site. And what do they do? "The macrophages start chewing up bacteria and keeping them under control." (P. 21) I noted that macrophage means literally, "big eater."

The students thought this was amazing. I asked: "Do you think there's a difference between the inflammatory response of the immune system, and how WE can get inflamed--swollen with anger?" They were surprised. Then, Alexi, who had often yelled at other students, said self-critically: "I get made first and ask questions later." Karen Osgood said, with a mingling of agitation and uncertainty: "There's this girl in one of my classes that makes me furious and I can't help it. I know I shouldn't be so angry but she says things to aggravate me and it makes me wild." "Is there anything you can learn about yourself," I asked, "from the way the neutrophils respond to a hurt?" "Well, they try NOT to let it spill over into the whole body," she said. "That's different from what I do, I let my anger affect everything."

II. The Body Has a Desire to Know; Or, The Specific Immune Response

We then studied how the immune system fights very specific invaders called antigens. An antigen is any substance that can cause a response of the immune system. It could be a virus, a bacterium, or even cat dander, to which a person might have an allergic reaction. I'll note here that allergy is one of the ways the immune system goes wrong, by being against a material coming from the world, which is really NOT an enemy. That's like the way we can want to turn something or someone into an enemy who actually isn't. But in this lesson we were studying the immune system at its best, which is really most of the time.

It's important, too, that this lesson on how the immune system protects the body, was in a context of many other lessons, in which my students had seen how much the outside world is FOR our bodies--including through the food we eat, the air we breathe, and the sunlight that, after traveling 93 million miles, reaches our skin and produces much needed Vitamin D. Our bodies, in fact, depend on the world for their very existence.

We learned that in the specific immune response there are two types of very specialized cells: T cells which are produce in the Thymus gland and B cells which are produced in the bone marrow.

A. The T Cell: As we saw, when an antigen enters the body, the energetic macrophages engulf it and break it down into very small bits. "The purpose of breaking down the antigen," I said to the class, "is ultimately for the immune system to be able to know it better. So, while the macrophages are clearly against the antigen, is the body in a deep way also for it, honoring it, through wanting to know it?" This is what they do: After engulging and breaking the antigen down, the macrophage displays a minute piece on its outer surface and actually shows it to a helper T cell. The helper T cell is also a white blood cell that acts as an intermediary in calling out the more specialized B and T cells. We were seeing how exact the body is trying to be in its response to a possible invader.

Part of this desire to be exact is the following: On the surface of every person's cells there is a marker like a fingerprint, that clearly identifies your cells as just yours! For reasons that are still not wholly known, it seems that the ONLY way the helper T cell will respond to the macrophage and begin to do its important work is, if along with a fragment of the invading antigen, the macrophage also displays right next to it, your body cell marker which clearly identifies the macrophage as belonging to your body. So the SELF and NOT-SELF must be presented to the helper T cells together.

This thrilled my students. Tom, whose pleasure in learning biology was growing, added, "That is wild." I asked the class, "Do you think the immune system is showing that it takes a threat seriously, but is also has a desire to KNOW?" "Yes," they said. "What mistakes do you think we make about the opposites of thought and activity?" Jorge said, "You can act too fast and not think." Jorge, who earlier had not wanted to talk in class, was excited to see within the cells of our bodies, a relation of thought and activity that looked strong to him. I asked the class, "Do you think what we want and what our dear country needs to have now, is what the immune system has: a beautiful relation of activity AND thought, response to a threat AND a desire to
know?" They wanted very much to talk about this. Daniel said strongly, "If we don't want to understand why people in other countries are angry with us, we'll make even more mistakes, and more poeple will die. Mariah added, "We need to find who is responsible for all the people who died on September 11th, but we shouldn't just bomb the whole country and assume everyone is a terrorist."

B. The B Cell: The B cells are responsible for destroying antigens that are found OUTSIDE cells, for example, in the blood. They accomplish this by producing antibodies that are genetically programmed to attack very specific antigens, at a staggering rate of up to 10 million antibodies an hour. My students loved seeing how, as the B cells take care of the immediate threat, they (the B cells) also have the wisdom and efficiency to produce long-term memory cells so that the next time the antigen shows up, the B cells response is: "I know you--I've seen you before?"--and they act with swiftness and accuracy. This is how we become immune, say, to chickenpox or some other childhood disease after having had it. And within days of releasing antibodies, sometimes with the help of antibiotics, our B cells conquer the invader and make us well!

III. The Immune System Can Teach Us How to Be For and Against the World in a Way We Are Proud Of!

We read the following from our textbook: No medicine known to man can find a virus-infected cell with as much precision, doggedness, mortal intent, and long-term memory as a killer T cell.

The killer T cells literally perforate and blow up cells with viruses lurking in them. They destroy cancer cells as well. We discussed the meaning of each of these words--precision, doggedness, mortal intent, long-term memory. There is ferocity here, but with precision and a hope for exactitude. It is a beautiful relation of for and against that we should be so grateful for and my students saw that.

Ultimately, the battle ends when the mission has been accomplished: the viruses destroyed, our bodies restored to health. That's when the suppressor T cells call off the attack and tell the killer T cells to cease. I asked the class, "Have you ever been angry with someone who later apologized to you, but you didn't want to stop being angry?" Several students said resoundingly, "Yes! I asked, "Suppose the killer T cells said, "I don't want to call off the attack: I'm not finished being ferocious--would that strengthen or weaken the body?" "Weaken it," they said. "This is because they go off on their own, sloppily mowing down and even destroying healthy cells. "Is this like a person who becomes blind with rage?" "Might we weaken ourselves, if we don't want to give up a wrong anger?" I asked. I said that many years ago I was angry at the world in a way that hurt my life very much--because the way I was against people and for my own opinons was generally inexact and sloppy. I'm very grateful that in an Aesthetic Realism class, Eli Siegel explained, "We like anger because we feel it establishes our personality." And he asked me, "Have you been interested in seeing whether your anger has been sloppy?" "No, I haven't been," I said, with a feeling of relief. He suggested an assignment that continues to change my life: to write an essay - "How Can I Be Proud of My Next Anger." I learned that a beautiful anger is one that is against what is unjust and for what will make the world better and stronger.

My students loved these lessons. They remembered the names and different jobs of the white blood cells, and when I reviewed the material for the final exam, they gave animated, exact descriptions of the workings of this complex system. That they were able to take all this is in, and even like taking it in--especially at this most frightening time in New York City--is so important.

The fall semester of 2001 was by far the most challenging of my entire teaching career, but it was also one of the most fulfilling. In the midst of difficult circumstances, my students showed they were thirsty for evidence that the world which seemed so chaotic and unpredictable could be respected and honestly liked. Through the Aesthetic Realism teaching method, they learned the subject, and came to feel the world as such was not an enemy, but a friend; and they became kinder, stronger, and happier.

Ninety percent of the students passed the course. In many of them, a sodden resignation changed into an energetic desire to learn, to do their homework, and study for tests. Forty students did an extensive extra credit project on an exhibit at the Museum of Natural History entitled, "The Genomic Revolution."

Tom Allen, who earlier had to leave his home near ground zero, asked and answered questions daily. His eyes had a sparkle in them, and the glazed look of once, was replaced by a warm smile and a keen interest in the subject. He got an 80 on the final exam. Jorge had completely stopped cutting class, was participating in discussions, and very proud that he was studying for and passing every exam. He too got a final grade of 80. Kim, one so angry, was now talking to her classmates. Her face had softened and she even smiled. When she learned she had passed the class, she shouted out loud with joy.

Note: *The names of students have been changed for this publication. For more information aobut this teaching method, call 212-777-4490 and see http://www.aestheticrealism.org/.

** Additional note: Portions of this work have been published before under the following name and reference: Plumstead, R. "Turning Anger into Respect." The Phillipine Post May 2002: 17-18.

Reference:
Hall, S. (1998) Billions of Powerful Weapons to Choose From. Arousing the Fury of the Immune System: A Report of the Howard Hughest Medical Institute. (pp. 6-24).

Rosemary Plumstead taught 33 years in New York City public high schools. She is a Consultant on the faculty of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, where, since 1975, she has taught along with her colleagues in All For Education, a bi-weekly workshop for educators and has traveled the country giving presentations on this method at art, science, and state education conferences. She is a co-auther of the book, Aesthetic Realism and the Answer to Racism by Alice Bernstein and Others, published by Orange Angle Press in 2004.

The People of Clarendon County Performed in Washington, DC

2009-10-25T10:00:00.000-07:00

"The People of Clarendon County"--a Play by Ossie Davis, was performed on October 21, 2009 at the Congressional Auditorium located in the U.S. Capitol Visiters Center, in Washington, D.C. I was present at this moving performance of the play. Written by Ossie Davis in 1955 and performed only once by Davis, Ruby Dee and Sidney Poitier, it was unearthed by Alice Bernstein, journalist and Aesthetic Realism Associate, and published with Ossie Davis's blessing. The play chronicles the courageous fight of black citizens living in Clarendon County, South Carolina to get schools and an education for their children equal to white children. It is stirring and inspiring to see how the battle fought by these ordinary citizens, unsung heroes of the civil rights movement, led to the landmark decision in Brown vs. the Board of Education in 1954. Also contained within this work, are photographs and historical documents from that time in Clarendon County and essays on how the philosophy of Aesthetic Realism, founded in 1941 by poet and historian Eli Siegel, can end racism.

Featured in this presentation, and in the book by Alice Bernstein, is the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method. This method, which I used for more than 30 years in New York City public high schools, enables students to learn the subject successfully and become deeper, kinder, more just individuals. Elementary educator, Monique Michael, gave a lesson on this historic evening about sameness and difference in birds--how they are made with similar AND different physical structures which enable to thrive in their environment. This diversity among living things is beautiful and persons in the audience--who were called on to participate--felt that the world would be less interesting without it. This is also true, Mrs. Michael pointed out, about human beings. She shows that we, too, are a thrilling and sensible relation of difference and sameness that should be honored, celebrated and respected without limit. You can view the program for this event by clicking above on "The People of Clarendon County."

The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method and The Purpose of Education

2009-10-07T19:40:00.000-07:00

I am pleased to publish an introduction that Eli Siegel wrote for the very first public seminar on the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method presented in 1973 by my colleagues, All For Education (TRO #1065). I had not yet learned of Aesthetic Realism. At the time, I was a fairly new teacher of health and physical education at Adlai Stevenson High School in the Bronx. While I liked teaching very much and cared for my students a great deal, I was already beginning to feel ineffective and burnt out. I pursued a Masters degree in Community Health because I wasn't convinced I would last in the classroom very long and I wanted an option in a closely related field.

Well, I did begin my study of Aesthetic Realism in 1974 and the rest is history. The reason I have loved the Aesthetic Realism approach to education, philosophic and everyday, is found in this introduction by Mr. Siegel. I loved the logic of its principles, their practicality and beauty. They enabled me to love teaching and to feel fresh after decades of being in the classroom. And I watched students minds flourish as they saw, through the opposites in the subject, that indeed the world could honestly be liked. And I am proud to say that since 1975, I have taught a bi-weekly workshop for educators on the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method as part of All For Education--Barbara Allen, Dr. Arnold Perey and Patricia Martone. And now the introduction:

"The Purpose of Education" by Eli Siegel

While it has been hinted or intimated often that the purpose of education is to come to a relation with the world which makes the world itself acceptable and oneself likewise a source of pride, it hasn't been clearly said that all education--whether geometry or agriculture, arithmetic, poetry, or computing--is for the purpose of liking the world.

Aesthetic Realism, in keeping with much that has been written of mind, says that mind does two things: it knows; and also likes and dislikes. The first of these possibilities is called the cognitive. All knowledge is some aspect of the cognitive. The second is called the affective; and all pleaure and pain, preference or dislike, hope and fear belong to the affective.

If people are rich in the cognitive--know things in the world and the world itself quite opulently--and don't like the world, it would seem that the knowing has not come to full avail. Suppose a person knows everything in any curriculum with fulness or subtlety and at the same time says, "All these subjects still have not made me think better of the world. I've studied engineering, and I'm not sold on the world. I've studied chemistry, and as far as I'm concerned, chemistry doesn't make me like the world at all better. I've studied theology, and theology makes me doubt the world. I've studied history, and I think the world in terms of its past is as much a mess as the present is."

We have to ask, then: What should be the relation of pleasure and pain, or the affective, to the cognitive, which has to do with knowing and not knowing? Aesthetic Realism says that where anything is known and whether one likes it or not is looked on as unimportant, there is a great deal of mental weakness in the world.

There are two things, then, in education. One is to know the world as well as possible. The other is to ask consciously whether the knowledge of the world can make for the like of the world. If it cannot, the world is a mistake. If it has to be that the more you know the world, the more you think it is against you or you don't have the valid right to care for it, then knowledge itself is part of a cosmological disruption and a mental disruption. Aesthetic Realism says that knowledge and feeling are the same thing; and that true knowledge of the world makes for true like of it.

The Art of Teaching as Explained by Aesthetic Realism

2008-09-18T11:50:00.000-07:00

I recently read an early (1982) issue of the international journal , The Right of Aesthetic Realism To Be Known titled, "Beauty in Time." It contains a portion of a 1951 lecture Eli Siegel gave in which he discussed a newspaper article about schools for children that were mentally ill. In this section, he describes with great kindness, charm and practicality the need for a teacher to put together the opposites of energy and repose to be effective in the classroom.

Prior to my study of Aesthetic Realism these opposites were at war in me and I didn't know how to change it. I went from frantic activity to not being able to get up off the couch. I moved at breakneck speed in the classroom, which I don't think was very composing to my students; then there were times I'd sleep the whole weekend away. The big thing I learned from Aesthetic Realism in consultations, was that I was not fair to the world and and people in my mind and so I didn't feel at ease under my own skin. Without knowing, this affected my whole life, including my tempo in the classroom. I'm grateful to say through what I learned in Aesthetic Realism consultations, and later in classes with Eli Siegel, this has changed greatly in my life. I look forward to changing even more. I also used the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method for 30 years in New York City classrooms with enormous success because of what I learned and have had the privilege of teaching it to teachers along with my colleagues in All For Education since 1975.

At this time in the history of education, there has been an unrelenting pressure on teachers and administrators to have their students pass standardized tests, and make that the sole thrust of learning. I thought it would encourage teachers to see that still, there is beauty in what they are after as a self and as an educator. Aesthetic Realism explains the source of that beauty--the oneness of opposites--and how to make it a reality in one's life.

The portion of the lecture I am quoting from is titled, "The Aesthetics of the Matter."

"The notion of beauty is implicit in every newspaper article you'll ever read; in fact, in every story that you'll ever hear, in everything that you'll ever tell yourself, in everything that you'll ever look at, hear, touch, taste, smell. The name Aesthetic Realism means that all reality has to do with aesthetics.

We have in this article the phrase "pilot school." A school is a place where a teacher urges children to learn, puts pressure on them in a sense, and yet, if she is a good teacher, acts as if the child should be entirely at ease and not feel under any pressure or under any hurry. What has this to do with aesthetics? Of course, a great deal.

The idea of energy and repose, which is very basic in reality, is present in all activity, not only that of a teacher teaching, but in any activity that has a purpose. The teacher must appear alive, must act as if she were concerned, exerting a definite influence on the children, and yet seem to act as if she were a quiet brook, quite at ease, quite restful.

If the teacher seems to be indifferent, and seems to be unconcerned, or too namby-pamby, or too wishy-washy, as some teachers are, then of course the children will notice it, and think of throwing spitballs; at least they won't like it; they'll go to sleep. On the other hand, if the teacher--as many are at certain times, particularly when the teacher is under stress herself--if the teacher seems to be like a battering ram, or is continually, in her mind, pulling the ears of the children, the children will likewise get restless.

So a good teacher, and for that matter a good person, has a problem of being at ease and yet showing energy. What is the basis of that problem? Where does it come from? How can one judge it? Aesthetic Realism says that the question of how to be reposeful is essentially an aesthetic question; and if any teacher asks herself, "How can I be a live teacher and yet not seem to be rushing the children or pressuring them?"--if she does want to answer that question fully, she'll have to get down to the aesthetics or the beauty of the matter.

Whenever there is energy and repose, there not only is efficiency, but in so far as the teacher represents energy and repose she would be beautiful...because in her manner there would be that combination of quiet and vividness that would make a picture beautiful, or music beautiful, or writing beautiful. And the only way to make sure that there is that energy and repose, is to see where energy and repose are to be found anywhere in reality--that is, to see how reality is seen as beautiful by having repose and energy."

There is a chapter in the book Self and World: An Explanation of Aesthetic Realism by Eli Siegel called, "The Aesthetic Method in Self-Conflict." In it he describes with great logic and everydayness, this principle of Aesthetic Realism: "Every person is always trying to put together opposites in himself or herself." I remember reading this early work of Mr. Siegel's in the 1970's and feeling new dignity and hope as I saw my personal questions given a basis in the study of aesthetics.

Art, Science and Aesthetic Realism

2007-11-15T09:30:00.000-08:00

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!

2007-10-05T13:10:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-15T13:53:00.000-07:00

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!

2007-04-23T09:20:00.000-07:00

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

2007-03-27T18:02:00.000-07:00

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

2007-01-03T17:08:00.000-08:00

"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

2006-12-28T18:05:00.000-08:00

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.

Aesthetics, The Human Heart and Ourselves!

2006-11-20T16:30:00.000-08:00

I loved teaching lessons on the structure of the human heart to my high school students at LaGuardia HS in New York City using the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method as the basis. As I studied the way the heart is made and saw how it put together opposites--strength and gentleness, assertion and yielding, separation and junction--I came to see it as having great beauty. I have never tired of showing this beauty as I have given presentations at art and science conferences throughout the years. This principle by Eli Siegel provides a solid framework through which teachers can see meaning and beauty in the facts of any subject: "The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites." Teachers at conferences have been thrilled, not only with a new way of seeing the heart--its structure and function--but how through the opposites, the day to day human questions that they and their students can have are gracefully related in the lesson.

A paper I gave at a public seminar on the human heart was published years ago by Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism Ellen Reiss in an issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, the international periodical of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation.

The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method Relates the Beauty in Art and the Beauty in Science

2006-06-22T09:30:00.000-07:00

For the last several years, my colleague Donita Ellison and I have given presentations at Art conferences throughout the New York Metropolitan area showing how the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method gracefully and powerfully relates the beauty in art and the beauty in science. Donita teaches art at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School and is an Aesthetic Realism Associate. I taught science at LaGuardia prior to my retirement in 2004.

Using this principle by Eli Siegel as the basis of our talks, we have had a wonderful time showing that the beauty in art and science are not in different worlds or of different quality: "The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites." We have given presentations on the relation of sameness and change in embryonic development and the modeling of clay; how surface and depth are beautifully one in the structure of the human skin and the art of printmaking; how separation and junction are inextricably one in the structure and function of the human heart and the making of a coil pot.

In each of these presentations we have also described how these same opposites present in the subjects we discussed, every teacher and student wants to put together in his or her own personal life. The Aesthetic Realism method answers the question, "Education: What For?" in the teaching of every subject--to like the world more and to know ourselves better. That it answers this question with such organization and excitement was the reason I loved using this method for more than 30 years.

These presentations grew out of a talk we gave at the 31st International Society for Education Through Art in New York City in August, 2002. To read this presentation on how power and delicacy are in the structure of the human hand and in preshistoric cave paintings, as explained by Aesthetic Realism, you can click here .

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

2006-05-13T08:10:00.000-07:00

The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method makes it possible for students to learn the subject and see, through the opposites, that the world has a structure that is beautiful and related to themselves. "All beauty," Eli Siegel stated, "is a making one of opposites and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves." In this article, originally given at a public presentation on education at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York City, I show how studying the different biomes of the world and also the structure of a tulip leaf, enabled students to like learning science. As I explained about my own life in this article, anger at the world decreases as our like of the world increases. This is one of the most hopeful facts I know. To read this paper in a two-part series, click here.

The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method is the Solution to the Crisis in Education--Teachers Tell Why! by Helena Simon

2006-04-14T10:30:00.000-07:00

I post a seminar paper given at the conclusion of her first year teaching by Helena Simon. Studies have shown that new teachers last an average of five years in New York City schools because they find it so hard to teach and they don't see the results they hope to bring about. Miss Simon shows in this paper, given at a public seminar at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation several years ago, the success of the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method on the elementary level in one of the toughest areas of New York City--Harlem. She is now a mother and home raising her young son Ethan, but what she writes about her students and how they learned successfully can give hope to many teachers. Click here to read Ms. Simon's paper.

Aesthetic Realism and Education Seminar

2006-02-18T18:05:00.000-08:00

The following is an announcement of a public seminar to be presented at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation on Thursday, March 2, 2006. The title is:

The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method Succeeds, & Answers the Question "Education--What For?"

In classrooms throughout America, students are asking of their teachers with anger and pain: "Why should I learn long division? What do I need history for?"--or earth science--or Shakespeare? A frustrated third grader asks her mother, "Am I learning math just to pass a test?"

The scientific, kind, and deeply satisfying answer to the urgent question "Education--What For?" will be given by New York City school teachers at this important public seminar. Using examples of actual classroom lessons, teachers will show how the Aesthetic Realism method enables students to learn successfully, with a sense of wonder and large meaning, and meet rigorous academic standards with greater ease. This is the educational method that can end the high dropout rates, the poor learning, and the violence in our nation's schools!

Eli Siegel, founder of Aesthetic Realism, explained definitively the what for? of education: "The purpose of education," he wrote, "is to like the world through knowing it." And he identified the greatest impediment to learning: contempt, "the addition to self through the lessening of something else."

The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method succeeds because it shows students that every subject in the curriculum says something about the world and their own often turbulent selves. The basis is this landmark principle:

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

For instance, there is Richard, a 7th grader who goes from feeling painfully stuck to frantically restless in one afternoon. As he learns that atoms put opposites together--they are made of electrons that whirl at terrific speeds around the protons and neutrons, which stay securely inside the atom's nucleus--he feels excited and composed at once. The very atoms that are in him--and also in his classmates and every bit of matter in the world--are doing what he wants to do: make a beautiful one of rest and motion, freedom and security! As students meet any item of the curriculum through the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method--a mathematical equation, a fact of history, the grammatical structure of a sentence--they feel, "This is about the world and it's about me!" They welcome learning, and they feel closer to other people, kinder!

For over 30 years, the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method has enabled students, including in some of the most economically hard-hit neighborhoods of New York City, to succeed in their studies. Increasingly educators have been learning about the Aesthetic Realism method through professional workshops; state and national conferences; and articles, written by teachers who use it, published in newspapers and educational journals. Come on March 2nd and see for yourself why this educational method is loved by students and their grateful parents and teachers!

Speakers: Rosemary Plumstead (science, LaGuardia HS, retired) Avi Gvili (Communication Arts, IS 7SI) Patricia Martone (ESL, PS 134M) Lori Colavito (1st grade, Southampton Elementary School) Arnold Perey (instructor, The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method)

Aesthetic Realism Foundation 141 Greene Street, NYC 10012 212-777-4490
www.aestheticrealism.org

My colleague, Dr. Arnold Perey, describes how through Aesthetic Realism the human self is so well understood that racism can end. Read Aesthetic Realism: A New Perspective for Anthropology.

And be sure to read what Friends of Aesthetic Realism have to say about the lies being told about it by a few scurrilous individuals on the internet at Friends of Aesthetic Realism, Countering the Lies.

Aesthetic Realism shows that our self-expression is enhanced crucially by our attitude to the world: when we want to have respect rather than contempt. For a wonderful example of this see Miriam Mondlin on the subject of stuttering.

Several thousand articles, letters, and columns about Aesthetic Realism have been published in newspapers and journals throughout the United States and abroad. Read some of them by clicking here.

Resources in music, art, education, the social sciences, and life; written by persons who study the philosophy founded by poet and critic Eli Siegel are available here.

Aesthetic Realism Online Library

2006-02-18T16:33:00.000-08:00

Go to the Aesthetic Realism Online Library to learn more about the philosophy of Aesthetic Realism and the important work of Eli Siegel.

Aesthetic Realism and Poetic Criticism

2006-02-16T09:30:00.000-08:00

Selected commentaries on Poetry by Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism Ellen Reiss
On Robert Burns and labor
• On Lord Byron
• On Emily Dickinson

The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method--Learn More!

2006-01-16T08:31:00.000-08:00

Technorati Profile

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

2005-12-27T14:14:00.000-08:00

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 Class Chairman 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 Iroquis 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 Iroquis 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 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!

2005-12-14T11:29:00.000-08:00

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 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.
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.
________________________________________
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. And 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, multicellular, 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.
________________________________________

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."

What is Education For?

2005-11-24T19:50:00.000-08:00

At this time in the history of education, there is enormous pressure on teachers and students to achieve standards and pass tests as the main indication that learning is taking place successfully in classrooms. In my opinion, testing certainly has its place and usefulness in education. But in the last years before I retired in July, 2004, I experienced the "standards and testing frenzy" that has teachers and students stressed, angry, and to say the least, puzzled. Isn't teaching and learning supposed to be a serious yet joyful experience?

Well, in April, 1963, Eli Siegel was answering the main question that I believe is churning in educators and in students today whether they know it or not--What is Education For?, and he does so in a way that is philosophic, meaningful, practical, bringing a desperately needed breathe of fresh air to how education should be seen. Mr. Siegel was then being interviewed by Peter Gorlin on WKCR radio and a short portion of that interview, published at the time by Definition Press, I am happy to recount for you now.

Mr. Gorlin. In many of your works, you have mentioned the relationship between Aesthetic Realism and education. Well--just what do you mean?

Mr. Siegel. The purpose of education is to have a person have an adequate sense of the world that he is of. Aesthetic Realism says that if the arts and the sciences are studies in opposites, then it would be well if education included Aesthetic Realism.

We have in Aesthetic Realism, as I see it, a method for that synthesis of the arts and sciences that all the educators in convention talk about: how can we bring together the value studies with the fact studies? how can we bring together the study of chemistry with the study of the values of the Renaissance? how can we bring together the study of the value of the Victory at Samothrace with the study of the nature of stone or marble or granite? how can we bring together church history with a full appreciation of a Monet painting of a saintly edifice?

Education has two purposes: One, to be fair to the world as it is, might be, was; and the other, to bring out all that we can be. Aesthetic Realism says that bringing out all that we can be is the same as being fair to the world that is, was, and might be.

So Aesthetic Realism is an educational method. And the first thing that it asks is: What is there is common in biology, and in history, and in the study of music, and in psychology, and in religion, and in cookery, and in the study of the history of sport, and in the study of fabrics, and in the study of chemistry, and the study of geology, and in the study of the dance? Is there something in common?

The one thing that is in common is, the opposites, because in every art and every science, there is the something that is and something that changes. In every art and in every science, there is Something One and Something Many. In every art and every science, there is the presence of the subjective and the objective. In every art and in every science, there is the presence of fact and value.

What I have mentioned are opposites. They each have an individual meaning. In biology, for example, there is life, but the life of an insect is quite clearly different from the life of a cow or the life of a philosopher. We have, then sameness and difference. Biology is the study of all life, and there is something akin in life, whether it is present in a butterfly, present in a fish, or present in a king, as Hamlet might say. The study of sameness and difference is the study of things where they begin.

Mr. Siegel stated years later that: "the purpose of education is to like the world through knowing it." And the means to knowing and liking the world is explained in this principle by him: "The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites." Throughout my thirty year career using the Aesthetic Realism teaching method,and teaching it to educators, this principle has provided a basis for my showing 1) that there is a structure of opposites making for beauty in every subject of the curriculum, in particular science; 2) that the beauty found in the subject shows that the world, with all its injustice, is made well and can therefore be honestly liked and respected; and 3) through the opposites the different subjects studied are related to each other and to the every day lives of students attending my classes. Studying how opposites are made one in the structure of the cell membrane, in the human heart, in plant transport, in the structure of a leaf, and so much more, made learning and teaching for ME a deep, exciting experience as I saw in a daily way evidence that there IS beauty in the very structure of how reality is made. As students use study of a subject to know and like the world, they learn AND they pass their standardized tests with ease. What is education for?--knowing and honestly liking the world we were born into as a means of liking ourselves!

The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method Succeeds: Students Learn, Prejudice is Defeated!

2005-06-12T21:43:00.000-07:00

The following is a portion of a paper on education I was pleased to give several years ago at a public seminar at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York City.
This article was also published in the Fall, 2004 issue of the PSTA Exchange.

For more than 27 years I have used the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method and I know that it can end prejudice--in students and teachers! It enables students to love learning, and to be kind, because Eli Siegel explained the purpose of education: "to like the world through knowing it." And he described the greatest interference to learning and the cause of all prejudice: contempt, which he defined as: "The addition to self through the lessening of something else."

When I began teaching in a Bronx high school in 1971, I would have denied that I was prejudiced. But the truth was, I unknowingly looked to find things in students that would ratify my anger with the world different from myself. This showed, I very much regret to say, in how I saw students of ethnic backgrounds different from mine. I mocked the accents of my Latino students and told myself that the African-American students were unmotivated. I was horribly superior to all my students and patronized them.

I loathe this ugly, contemptuous, inaccurate way of seeing, and am tremendously thankful that through my Aesthetic Realism education I have changed! As I learned in Aesthetic Realism consultations about the fight in me, as it is in every person, between the desire to respect the world and people and my desire to have contempt, I saw more truly what represented me. And I am very grateful that now as I look at my students, I see them as having rich meaning, dignity, depth of mind. And I want to bring the very best out of them--and also learn from them.

I tell now what happened in two Regents biology classes I taught at LaGuardia High School in Manhattan. The young people I teach come from diverse ethnic backgrounds. They are horribly affected by our unjust economy. Many live in some of the most unsafe areas of New York, and some hear gunshots daily. Many have part-time jobs after school and on weekends to help their families.

When I first met these 9th and 10th graders, I saw that students of the same ethnic background tended to stay close to each other and separate from those of other backgrounds. Often, when one student asked a question, others would talk together and not listen. They simply did not feel the thoughts of another were worthy of interest and respect. Many of these young people had met racial prejudice, and they understandably but wrongly used the injustice to feel, "This is a messy world, and I have a right to hate everything--from the person sitting next to me whose skin color is different, to the boring subjects I'm supposed to learn!" Through the Aesthetic Realism teaching method, this feeling changed! I was able to show them through the facts of science that the world has a thrilling, sensible structure, from which we can learn about ourselves. I told the class, "The basis of these lessons is this great principle of Aesthetic Realism, stated by Eli Siegel: "The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites."

I. The Cell Membrane is Not Prejudiced

As we looked at an illustration in our text, I asked the class, "Can you see what the major function of the cell membrane is?" Tonya said, "It separates the cell from what's around it." James added, "Things the cell needs, like water and oxygen, are transported through the membrane." Right away we saw the opposites: every cell membrane both separates and joins, is impermeable and also permeable, in a beautiful and efficient way. The fact that this takes place everywhere is every person's body, in a structure that is so fundamental yet so minute, is awesome.

In this class we were studying phospholipids, of which the double wall of the membrane is made. I drew one on the board and told the class, "A phospholipid is a molecule which has a head made of a phosphate group, and two fatty acid tails. The head is hydrophilic, which means it is water-loving. The two fatty acid tails, however, are hydrophobic, or water-fearing.

There is a watery environment outside the cell membrane as well as inside the cell; and every cell membrane is made up of two layers of phospholipids. Through a diagram in "Biology: Living Systems" by Oram and Hummer, we saw that the cell membrane is formed when, in the presence of water, the phospholipids spontaneously align themselves with the water-loving heads facing the water both inside and outside the cell, and the water-fearing tails facing away from the water.

"What makes it stay like that?" Shantel asked. My students found the reason amazing. "The dynamic force keeping the phosopholipids in place," I said, "arises from the oneness of attraction and repulsion. The water-loving phosphate heads are attracted to the water molecules, while at the same time the hydrophobic fatty acid tails are repulsed by them."

"As we look at this cell membrane," I contined, "are we seeing the opposites of for and against working together beautifully, making for its stability?" And this takes place in the cells of all living beings! Then I asked, "Is it taking place in the person sitting next to you right now, who may be from a different culture?" I saw students look at each other with a sense of wonder.

"When you see the aesthetic structure of the world," Ellen Reiss, Class
Chairman of Aesthetic Realism has explained,"you respect the world, and you don't feel you've got to get revenge on it. You cannot have a prejudice against a person when you see the aesthetic structure of the world in him or her."

II. Can We Include and Exclude Beautifully?Proteins in the phospholipids play a central role in the ability of the membrance to allow certain materials to pass into and out of the cell. Different proteins, assisted by enzymed, will include and exclude--keep out something a blood cell doesn't need that will be allowed entry into a nerve cell.

Seeing these opposites made one in the cell membrane led to a discussion about how we, in our attitude to things, include and exclude, are for and against. Is it on a respectful basis or a contemptuous one? "Do you think the way we exclude the thoughts and feelings of people different from ourselves is as kind and sensible as what happens with the cell membrane?," I have asked; and "Do you think if a person doesn't like the world, he or she can become impenetrable and hard?"

By the end of the semester the students were definitely kinder to each other. As students saw day by day that they share a structure of opposites--beginning in their very cells--they had more respect for each other and the world. And through the opposites, they had a real grasp of the subject. 93 percent of these students passed the course.

For more information about the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method and workshops given for educators you can visit the Foundation's website at: www.aestheticrealism.org

Short Poems by Eli Siegel

2005-05-19T21:10:00.000-07:00

The following are short poems by Eli Siegel and each in their own way, has to do with education.

The Whole Sun

The whole sun may
Shine on one useful, little, metal tray.

This Science is Praised

There should be the science
Of our discontents.

Simultaneously

I am in immensity,
Immensity's in me.
This makes one free--
Seen simultaneously.

Aesthetic Realism and "The Hope That Will Not Leave One," by Eli Siegel

2005-04-06T14:15:00.000-07:00

I am pleased to publish the following paragraphs written by Eli Siegel in 1973 as an introduction to a public seminar given then by Aesthetic Realism Consultants to women Devorah Tarrow and Margot Carpenter. What goes on in love and social life has not been seen by men and woman as a subject of education--that one can actually learn what it means to meet your own deepest hopes in love and the hopes of another person. That is what Eli Siegel writes about in: "The Hope That Will Not Leave."

"In the past, many women hoped that the person closest to them was known by them in a beautiful way. A woman's desire to know someone close to her, and worthy of being close, in a manner that looks good to her and more beautiful to her as her lifes goes on--that is still the hope that will not leave. It is also her desire that the way she is known look more beautiful. It is all in keeping with perhaps the most poetic expression in the New Testament, 1 Corinthians 13.

The matter of knowing and being known is a high philosophic matter, but it can be said that sex, with all its use of sense, goes for that. To be known and to know at once is the sensible and poetic desire of woman; and since man at his beginning is very much like woman, it is the greatest desire of a man too. The worst thing that happens to marriage, or a relation that is not marriage, is the resignation that both people may have to incomplete or spurious knowing of each other. Loneliness has gone on because the way one sees oneself is not the way another sees one.

The problem of knowing is the same as the problem of liberation. If we do not wish to know, we shall never be free. If we do not wish to be known, we also shall never be free. The danger of not being known is to put on a socially affable air equivalent to the idea that we are known or that it doesn't matter. Once we consent to not knowing another or not being known, we have said our lives are not worth much. The greatest hope of woman, then, is to do something deep and honest and great with the possibility of knowing and being known. It is still a new endeavor; and Aesthetic Realism hopes to encourage people not to be satisfied with something less than what they deeply want.

Women in the nineteenth century came to the end of their lives feeling that the person who was with them for many years was still somebody else and they were somebody else to that person. What closeness there was the closeness of propinquityand custom. There is another thing possible. Every woman should hope to be loved, surely, but also should hope to love the way another person sees her. If she gives that up, she is saying her life isn't worth much because her deepest hope is not worth much. The great problem of love is the problem of: How do we want to know another and how do we want to be known? This question is great, eternal, lovely, and also immediate for every person."

An Excerpt from "The Child," A Chapter from Self and World by Eli Siegel

2005-03-14T19:50:00.000-08:00

As a teacher of 33 years in New York City High Schools, I found Eli Siegel's chapter called "The Child," from his Self and World: An Explanation of Aesthetic Realism, invaluable. With tremendous depth, kindness, and comprehension, Mr. Siegel describes the inner life of representative children, enabling parents and teachers to see them with greater fullness and respect. It enables us to know our own selves better and also meet more fully the hopes of children and young people we know. This chapter is a must for every parent and teacher. For example, Mr. Siegel writes:

"The purpose of education is to bring to the child's desire for order and diversity, fit material through which this desire can operate. A parent or teacher does not bring order to a child as he might bring an apple. It is the duty of a parent or teacher, humbly and respectfully, to see that the desire for full accuracy already existing in a child not be blunted or distorted. For this, an understanding of what mind and self as such are, is necessary. One may say this is hard to know; this is a metaphysical problem. Yet the difficulty of the problem does not destroy the necessity for meeting it.

When Joe Johnson was born, there was something he was after. The force in him that made his heart beat, had purpose to it. His possibilities were his purpose. If we don't know what these possibilities are or what the purpose is, we should honestly say that we are working basically in the dark. We know that Joe wanted to be well. The question is: Well for what? We know that he wanted to have good metabolism: A good metabolism for what? We know that very likely he wanted to learn the alphabet: The alphabet for what? We know that he wanted to get along with other children and other people: To get along for what? If that deepest purpose, even though he and we do not see it clearly, is deflected or injured, the self of Joe Johnson will not be at ease. If it isn't at ease it will retaliate.

I have said earlier that the principal desire of every human being is to know; that is, to have reality in mind. To know the world is to be at one with it; and this means to be happy. I believe that every activity of the child has something to do with the desire to know..."

Self and World: An Explanation of Aesthetic Realism by Eli Siegel, was published by Definition Press in 1981.

Aesthetic Realism and Hon. Elijah E. Cummings

2005-02-19T16:50:00.000-08:00

It is with great respect and pride that I include in this website the statement read into the Congressional Record by the Honorable Elijah E. Cummings, who at the time was Chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus. As a person who has studied and taught the philosophy of Aesthetic Realism for more than 35 years, I am very happy to share his high opinion of Mr. Siegel and his life's work, Aesthetic Realism.

Honoring Eli Siegel

Hon. Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland

In the House of Representatives

Friday, July 26, 2002

Mr. CUMMINGS. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor a great Baltimorean poet, educator, and founder of Aesthetic Realism, Eli Siegel.

Mr. Siegel was born in 1902 and grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, where his contributions to literature and humanity began. Mr. Siegel founded the philosophy Aesthetic Realism in 1941, based on principles such as: Man’s deepest desire, his largest desire, is to like the world on an honest or accurate basis, and ... The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.

Mr. Siegel explained that the deepest desire of every person is "to like the world on an honest basis." He gave thousands of lectures on the arts and sciences.

Mr. Siegel’s work continues at the not-for-profit Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York City, where classes, lectures, workshops, dramatic presentations, and poetry readings are offered. In addition, a teaching method, based on Aesthetic Realism, has been tested in New York City public schools. The teaching method has been tremendously successful.... The teaching method may be used as an effective tool to stop racism and promote tolerance; because it enables people of all races to see others with respect and kindness.

In 1925, Eli Siegel won the esteemed Nation Poetry Prize for "Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana," which brought him to national attention. "Hot Afternoons," Mr. Siegel said, was affected by his thoughts of Druid Hill Park. And so, it is fitting that on August 16, 2002, the city of Baltimore will dedicate the Eli Siegel Memorial at Druid Hill Park on a site near the Madison Avenue entrance, not far from his early home on Newington Avenue. The bronze memorial plaque ... includes a sculptured portrait and poetry.

Mayor Martin O’Malley has designated August 16, 2002 as "Eli Siegel Day" in Baltimore. At this time, I would like to insert the Mayor’s proclamation and a few of Eli Siegel’s poems found in the June 5, 2002 [issue] of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation magazine for the record.

Eli Siegel died in 1978, but his poetry and the education of Aesthetic Realism will be studied in every English, literature, and art classroom across the nation for years to come. I would like to end this tribute by reciting a poem Eli Siegel wrote honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:

SOMETHING ELSE SHOULD DIE:

A POEM WITH RHYMES

(By Eli Siegel)

In April 1865

Abraham Lincoln died.

In April 1968

Martin Luther King died.

Their purpose was to have us say, some day:

Injustice died.

Eli Siegel wrote poems for more than six decades. These poems expressed his thoughts on people, feelings, everyday life, love, nature, history. I am proud to offer this tribute.
Thank you.

The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method and the Desire to Know by Rosemary Plumstead

2005-02-10T18:38:00.000-08:00

When I began studying Aesthetic Realism in 1974, I was asked for the first time in my life to think consciously about this question: what does it mean to know? This is one of the most fortunate occurances of my life because I was given the rare opportunity to reconsider how much of the world I had wanted to know and how deeply. Through my Aesthetic Realism education my attitude to the whole world has changed, including how I see knowledge. "The purpose of all education," Eli Siegel stated, "is to like the world through knowing it." As I have wanted to know the world more my mind has gone from something like a dark room to one with true sunlight in it. I, for the most part, used what I knew to be important rather than fair to the world. In my mind, knowing a subject was being able to feel I was in control of it and through it, the world. How different this is from the purpose I came to have as a teacher using the Aesthetic Realism method.

I have learned from Aesthetic Realism that what it means to know the world is to see it aesthetically, as a oneness of opposites. The basis of my lessons is in this principle by Eli Siegel:

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

Through seeing how the world and ourselves are a oneness of the opposites of fact and meaning, sameness and difference, specificity and relation, my students and I have been able to know more about the world and to find likeable meaning in it.

I. Opposites in a Molecule and Yourself

In a general science lesson I taught to 9th grade students, they were learning how to like the structure of the world through the way opposites are made one in a simple water molecule. And they were also learning how the opposites in a water molecule can teach them about some of the most troubling questions of their lives.

We began my looking at one atom of hydrogen. In the textbook, Chemistry: A Humanistic Approach, by Lidia Vallarino and James Quagliano, there is this description:

Hydrogen is present in enormous quantities in the Sun and in
other stars. On Earth, hydrogen is one of two components of
water. Thus, it is present everywhere there is water--in the
oceans, lakes, rivers, and clouds. There is also water in the sap
of plants and in the bodies of animals. Thus, all of these things
contain hydrogen as a major component.

Hydrogen is the simplest and also the lightest of all the elements. It consists of only one positively charged particle called a proton, which is located in the nucleus and seems more at rest, and one negatively charged particle called an electron, which is in constant motion circling around the nucleus. Every hydrogren atom puts together the opposites of positive and negative, heaviness and lightness, simplicity and complexity, rest and motion.

These same opposites pain young people very much. For example, the same girl who is exuberantly in motion, talking with her friends during the change of class, can, twenty minutes later, fall sound asleep during a lesson. I asked Myra Douglas, "Do you feel that when you're at rest, reading a book, you're the same person as when you're in motion?" Myra said, "No, I don't." As Myra and the other students saw that every hydrogen atom present in the sun, stars and themselves puts together the opposites of rest and motion at the same time, they began to see that there is a kinship between themselves and the outside world.

We also saw that as abundant as hydrogen is, it cannot exist in the earth's atmosphere by itself, that is, as a free element. Hydrogen must form a bond with atoms different from itself; and if that is not possible, it will bond to another hydrogen atom. This is a study in independence and need, separation and junction.

We looked at a diagram of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom separated from each other. In this state, I explained, each atom--hydrogen and oxygen--is highly reactive. That is, they are agitated because they are incomplete. Each atom has electrons the other atom needs in order to complete an electron ring and therefore become stable. They get this stability through what is called electron sharing. The separate atoms JOIN and form what is called a covalent bond.

I told the class, "In order for hydrogen to become the life-sustaining substance, water, it must be joined with and completed by oxygen. If this junction did NOT take place, there would be no water, and without water, there would be no life." This fact moved my students very much.

They were also thrilled to see that as each atom GETS stability through bonding, it also GIVES stability. What does this say about our lives? In Self and World: An Explanation of Aesthetic Realism, Eli Siegel writes:

"A person is separate from all other things and together with all
other things. To understnad opposites in a self, the meaning of
together and separate must be seen...The probleem that faces a
self is how to make its separateness at one with its togetherness.
This is the problem which is underneath all others. It can make
for agony and it can make for triumph; it can make for painful
jumpiness or mobile composure. "

We saw that every atom in a water molecule solves the problem Mr. Siegel describes--"how to make its separateness at one with its togetherness." Not being able to put these opposites together torments young people.

I asked my class, "Can you think of any time when you're completely separated from the world?" One student said, "Yes, when you're asleep." Another students said, "no, because you're breathing." And another student added, "You're also dreaming." Seeing this pleased them very much and I saw that it gave them a sense of composure to know that always they are in relation to the outside world.

II. The Study of the Opposites Combats Contempt

I am so gratetful that in an Aesthetic Realism class in 1975, Eli Siegel wrote ten statements about education. In point three, there are these sentences:

"We want to know the world better and welcome it and we want to
put it aside and forget about it. This desire to welcome the world
and put it aside can get one very angry."

Students can feel that the world is a confusing, painful place and things are just too much for them. Many have parents who are out of work and face eviction from their homes. The rising cost of tuition is making it impossible for students to attend college and they feel they have to settle for lives that are less than they what they truly hope for. Without knowing it, young people are in a terrible fight between wanting "to put aside the world," and wanting to welcome it. Learning how to like the world through the subject counters the despair that can be in students and enables them to be more critical of injustice in the world.

I pointed to the molecule of water drawn on the blackboard, and we were excited to see that two gases, hydrogen and oxygen, together make a liquid, water, through how they join and work together, and it is beautiful. "Does this show," I asked, "that it is possible for us to be joined to the world in a way that makes us stronger and also free?" They thought, "Yes."

This lesson and others like it throughout the term well affected my students' lives. Their minds worked with greater depth and clarity as they saw how opposites are one in the structure of the atom, or the periodic table, and that these same opposites are present in their mothers and in themselves. They pass standardized tests with greater confidence and ease.

At the end of the term, Marian Fuller, who earlier described how she liked to be by herself in her room, wrote: "I learned that I can never be separated from the world. I will always be in and of the world through taking in oxygen." Another young woman who in September said that the thing she liked to do most, including in my class, was to sleep, no longer feels this. Students who were angry get along better with each other and are so much happier.

It means my life to me that I feel my effect on my students is strengthening. Through the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method every teacher can have this wonderful feeling every day!

The Aesthetics of Science Education

2005-01-26T17:24:00.000-08:00

THE AESTHETIC REALISM TEACHING METHOD: THE SOLUTION TO OUR NATIONAL EMERGENCY IN EDUCATION!

BY ROSEMARY A. PLUMSTEAD

The Aesthetic Realism of Eli Siegel is the solution to the national emergency in education. For more than 30 years, I have used it as the basis of my teaching students from every borough of New York City, and what I have seen happen to their ability to learn is what educators everywhere are longing for.

Eli Siegel explained the purpose of education: “to like the world through knowing it.” When students see in the facts about a subject that the same world that can pain and confuse them is made in a way they can honestly respect, they learn eagerly. I have seen students who were furious and on the verge of dropping out, give the world a second chance. They retain what they learn, they pass the course and they become kinder.

LaGuardia High School in Manhattan, where I teach, is a school for students interested in the arts. Like young people throughout America, they are affected horribly by our economic system. The prospect of a well-paying job is bleak. Many can’t afford to attend even local colleges because the tuition is too high and books are expensive. For example, Yvette James,* who spent the year selling cupcakes so she could get a dress for graduation. And when I asked Karen Dobbs why she was absent so often, she told me her father had lost his job and her family was forced to move in with an aunt.

Environmental Science & Ourselves

I’ll speak today about one lesson, on symbiosis, which I taught in my environmental science classes. The basis of it and all my teaching is this principle stated by Mr. Siegel: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.” The lesson I’ll tell of brought out my students’ desire and ability to learn because they saw evidence that the world has structure that can be honestly liked: it is a oneness of dependence and independence, sameness and difference. The textbook “Biology: The Dynamics of Life,” describes symbiosis as a dramatic situation in which organisms of different species are interdependent on each other for protection, food, or energy.

I asked the class, “What do you think are the possible effects that two organisms can have on each other?” “Positive, negative, or no effect,” Myrna answered. In the case where two organisms of different species have a positive effect on each other, benefit from their interdependence," I explained, "it is called mutualism." And when I asked for an example, Tony spoke about a National Geographic video we’d seen on the tropical rainforest. “How about the ants and the tree,” he said: “they helped each other.”

The swollen thorn acacia tree, which grows in the Costa Rican rainforest, is inhabited by a species of ants, and the tree and the ants completely support each other. The acacia has edible leaves, which make it prey to plant-eating insects. But the ants come to the rescue! Any insect that lands on the leaves is visited by the ants, who nip at it until it flees.

In turn, the acacia tree takes care of the ants. It secretes a sugary, rich solution that the ants can drink. It also provides oval shaped structures on the leaves of some branches which the ants remove and carry as food to their developing larvae. These larvae are housed in huge thorns on the limbs of the tree. “It’s great,” said Manny.

“What opposites are made one in mutualism?” I asked. “Well, they’re both helping each other and getting something too,” Candace called out. Each is an independent organism, trying to survive. To have the ability to help another is an aspect of independence; to need something from that other is dependence.

Then I asked Lydia about the same opposites in us. “How long can you live without oxygen?” “Just a few minutes,” she said. “So we’re completely dependent on oxygen for life. But,” I continued, “does the fact that the world supplies the oxygen we need, enslave us or make us free?” “I think it makes us free,” she said, smiling.

That I could see needing the world as the same as freedom, I owe to my Aesthetic Realism education in individual consultations and later in classes taught by Mr. Siegel. As to how I saw needing people, he asked me: “Do you have a desire to defy anything that comes from someone else?” “Yes, I do,” I answered. And he asked: “Is there any person in this world who couldn’t be useful to you?” No-every person provides a chance, at least, to know more. I began to think about dependence and independence in a new way.

These opposites trouble everyone, and very much high school students. They want to run their own lives, and resent having to answer to anybody, including parents. They also want to feel that they need other people--for friendships, encouragement. Through learning about mutualism, we were also learning how to have these opposites in a better relation in our own lives.

Good Will in Nature?

We talked about another pair of opposites: sameness and difference. “What do you notice,” I asked, “about the organisms that are involved in this relation?” “They’re very different from each other,” said Jennifer. We discussed how each, though different, has a similar purpose—to survive—and does so by taking care of the other organism, making it stronger.

I told them this definition of good will by Eli Siegel: “the desire to have something else stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful.” “Do you think that something like good will is going on between two beings in mutualism?” “Yes,” they answered. “There are thousands of instances in which this occurs,” I said. Mikhail told how lichen, which lives on bare rock, is formed by a relation of alga and fungus which support each other. Jose thought of how plants provide oxygen for us while we provide carbon dioxide for them. We had a deep discussion in one class about whether the relation between a blind person and a seeing eye dog was an example of mutualism. We thought so.

I asked the class, “How different do you think the world would be if people took good will seriously?” “Very different,” commented Manny thoughtfully. Through the opposites my students were learning science and at the same time, becoming deeper, more compassionate people.

Commensalism & Parasitism Too

In the relation called commensalism, the opposites of sameness and difference, dependence and independence are present differently. In commensalism, the textbook said, one organism benefits and the other is seemingly unchanged. For example, when a barnacle attaches to a whale, it gets to travel over lots of territory in which to feed, and this has a good effect on the barnacle. For all intensive purposes, it does not seem that the whale is affected by the presence of the barnacles, though scientists have used them for identifcation purposes.

Clearly, there is a thrilling, even humorous relation of sameness and difference between these two beings: both live in water and eat organisms found there, but a whale weighs as much as 58 tons and travels hundreds of miles, while the barnacles weigh only ounces and as adults are unable to move on their own. This relation pleased my students very much.

There was a great deal of stir in the class as we looked at the last type of relationship, parasitism. In it, difference and sameness, dependence and independence are at war. In parasitism, one organism gets stronger by feeding off and weakening another. In most cases, the parasite damages or causes disease in the host, and it can even cause death

My students were most interested in the tapeworm, which secures itself to the inner walls of an animal or human intestine and absorbs its food. They looked at slides of a tapeworm, and saw how it works. “It’s so nasty!” Ronnie said. Every now and then I’d hear “yuk” from somewhere in the room. But they were gripped. We were all seeing this tremendously important fact: even something evil can be a subject of knowledge. We were seeing what Mr. Siegel explained: “Reality, says science, is at least good to know.”

“What can we learn about ourselves from these symbiotic relationships?” I asked. “I think people can be like parasites sometimes,” commented Alicia. “In business they can want to get ahead and it doesn’t matter who they step on.” “But do you think there are ordinary ways that we take the life out of things around us?” I asked. “By making fun of someone,” Terry remarked. “Not caring about someone’s feelings,” Jeremy replied. These are instances of contempt, which Mr. Siegel defined as “the addition to self through the lessening of something else.”

“Can these organisms teach us something about how we want to be?” I asked. “Do we want to be strong by respecting what’s different from us, including people, by hoping they are as good as they can be; or do we want to get a false sense of strength through making less of people? The cruelty and violence that make the streets of New York and the halls in many schools dangerous,” I said, “come from contempt”—from the feeling we’ll be more if we lessen someone else.”

When I asked, “Of the three relationships we studied, which one would you be proud to have?,” Ronnie said, “Mutualism”—to the agreement of others.

Ninety percent of these students passed the course. On Open School Night one mother waited a half an hour to tell me, “My son loves science for the first time, and he’s passing. Thank you so much.” The students have more respect for each other, and for life as such. Julian Thomas wrote: “I used to shoot birds with my BB gun, but since this class I saw they have feelings. I don’t do it anymore.” And Reginald Moore wrote that he thought if all students could learn through the Aesthetic Realism method, “our community would get along better. There would be a stupendous change in society, tremendous improvement.” I am proud to agree with Reginald.

Rosemary Plumstead is a consultant on the faculty of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation and has presented workshops for science educators at many professional conferences. This paper was part of a public seminar given at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York City. For more information about the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method, you can visit the Foundation’s website at: http://www.aestheticrealism.org/.

*The student’s names have been changed.

The Aesthetics of Science Education

2005-01-24T18:08:00.000-08:00

The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method Motivates Children to Learn!

By Rosemary A. Plumstead

For the last 30 years and through the lives of thousands of young people, I have seen how the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method brings out, with tremendous success, students' ability to learn. This kind and scientific teaching method, based on principles stated by Eli Siegel, is true about every subject and fair to the mind of every student. The purpose of education, he explained is “to like the world through knowing it.” And THE biggest interference with learning is contempt—the feeling we will be more by making less of the outside world. It is the desire for contempt that impels a student to see the world, represented by the subjects of the curriculum, as boring and meaningless. And contempt motivates a teacher to belittle a student, to think with disgust, “this student will never learn.” Students and teachers need to learn about the on-going battle in oneself between respect and contempt if eductation is to succeed!

In this article I describe a Living Environment class which I taught at LaGuardia High School in Manhattan--a school for the performing and visual arts. The students at LaGuardia come from many different backgrounds—some are affluent, others are from families where there is great worry about money. One young man could barely keep his eyes open in class because he was playing in a band late nights to help pay the rent. Students are angry and in despair as college tuition and the price of textbooks soar.

Our unjust economic system, which I abhor, robs people daily of hope and human dignity. 600,000 children in New York State alone are without medical insurance and look to school health clinics for medical care. Young people are right to be angry at the injustices they meet, but I have seen they very often wrongly change a just anger into the victory of having contempt for everything.

As the semester began, many of my students showed they had trouble learning science. Nancy told me with a mingling of triumph and self-disgust, “I never did get science. I don’t really like it.” Alex said with pain and embarrassment, “I can’t keep what I learn in my head and I don’t know why.” When Javier spoke, students made fun of his Spanish accent, and he, insulted, would yell at them and then take the bathroom pass. Daryl sat in the back of the room tapping a ruler on his desk while talking to his neighbors. Sometimes it took ten minutes to begin the lesson.

But I have seen year after year, the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method powerfully succeeds in encouraging even the most cynical student’s desire to learn, because it shows through the very facts of the subject, that the world has a structure that is logical and beautiful. With this great principle by Eli Siegel as the basis of the lessons I teach, my students’ ability to learn biology increases by leaps and bounds: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.” As they see that opposites are at the heart of the subject, and that these very same opposites are in them, they feel a wide, deep, friendly, relation to the subject, to the world it represents, and they become kinder to each other.

I. The Digestive System Puts Together Opposites—Beginning with Simplicity and Complexity, Large and Small!

I began the lesson by writing this sentence on the board. “The purpose of digestion is to take large, complex molecules present in food, and break them down into smaller, simpler molecules that can be used by the body.” I asked the class, “As you look at this sentence, what opposites do you see as central in the process of digestion?” Sharon said, “Complex and simple and large and small.” “Yes,” I said. “The food we eat has within it nutrients the body needs, but they’re not in a form that can do us good. What we’re going to see, and it’s thrilling, is that our bodies have the ability to change large, complex molecules within food, into smaller, simpler molecules the body can use.

I asked Sharon, who majors in dance, “Do you think every person is simple and complex?” She smiled and said, “Yes.” “For instance, you’re a 9th grade girl, that’s fairly simple,” I said, “but do you also have a whole range of complex emotions?” “Yes,” she said thoughtfully. “And do you think the art you care for, the dance, is always a relation of complexity and simplicity—for instance, there are complicated movements made up of simpler elements or steps?” “Yes!” she said.

You’re going to see a beautiful relation of the opposites of simple and complex at work in the digestive process, opposites that we can feel tossed about by at any moment of our lives.”
The everyday feeling that these opposites of simplicity and complexity don’t go together can torment people—including students. We spoke about how in life we can feel things are too complicated—we’re complex, other people are hard to understand, it’s all too much, and we can want things to be easy. But then we can feel things are simple in the bad sense—they’re dull. We get restless, and long to meet new things. I told the class, “Well, the digestive process does exactly what we’re looking for—it is a beautiful, simultaneous relation of complexity and simplicity that can show us what we want!”

For example, I asked: “When you eat a tuna fish sandwich, what happens? Your body is going to take in nutrients from it by breaking down the proteins in the tuna fish, the carbohydrates in the bread, the fat in the mayonnaise—to their simplest form—amino acids, monosaccharides, and lipids.” “Then guess what it’s going to do with these organic compounds?” I asked. “It’s going to get rid of them?” Samuel asked. “No,” I said, “These same nutrients become the building blocks of new complex proteins and fats.” “That is so cool,” Miriam said with a look of surprise and pleasure. My students were affected to see how wonderfully efficient the digestive system is as it works to nourish the whole body with all its complicated, diverse parts. It is not daunted by the task—no, it does a beautiful job with both complexity and simplicity during digestion.

As part of this dance, this simultaneity of complexity and simplicity, there are two ways these large portions of food are made smaller: physically and chemically. We read this from the textbook, Biology: Living Systems by Raymond F. Oram:

Digestion begins when you put food in your mouth…Teeth physically
Grind and tear the food into smaller pieces. This process makes the
Food particles small enough to swallow and increases the surface area
[so] the enzymes are better able to begin the chemical process of digestion.

“As this process continues, literally every inch of the way, I told my students, “ it is a oneness of various pairs of opposites.” In this article I’ll mention only a few. In each instance, seeing opposites they were trying to put together made one in digestion, students liked learning the subject.

II. The Esophagus Does a Good Job with Freedom and Control, the Voluntary and Involuntary

“After you swallow, “ I asked the class, “Where does the food go next?” Looking at a diagram, the students identified the esophagus, which is a passageway from the mouth to the stomach. And I asked: “Do we have control of what happens to the food anymore?” “No,” Daryl said with a look of surprise. They were glad to see something we can take so much for granted—the movement of food from our mouths to our stomachs, occurs with great order—but it’s out of our control. The food doesn’t get stuck because of the involuntary, but so precise action of the esophagus. The way it works is sheer aesthetics—the muscles of the esophagus alternately contract and relax, gently but firmly pushing the food towards the stomach. This action we learned is called peristalsis.

Upon arriving in the stomach, a hollow organ that churns and mixes the food, enzymes and gastric juices slowly and deliberately break down carbohydrates further and begin to break down proteins. My students and I were amazed to see that as food moves through the digestive tract, there is a timing that is very precise—a beautiful relation of speed and slowness that allows enzymes to work on the food and good digestion possible. We saw that the food moves through the mouth and esophagus swiftly—staying only about a minute—but as it reaches the stomach, it remains there about four hours. I asked, “Why do you think the food stays so long in the stomach?” Sam said, “It takes time for the enzymes to break it down.” Yes. If that tuna fish sandwich moved through the digestive tract too slowly or too swiftly we would not be able to absorb the needed nutrients contained in it. Is this what we want for ourselves, a good relation of slowness and speed, lingering and moving on?

I told my students that I once had a hard time with these opposites—that I could talk very fast and move about swiftly, even while I was teaching. My students would get dizzy with the activity! Then at other times, I would feel sluggish and dull and I didn’t understand why. Many students nodded their heads in recognition of something they too experienced. I said I learned from Aesthetic Realism that a person can use both going too fast and being immobile as a way of being unaffected by things and people. And in an Aesthetic Realism class Eli Siegel suggested I listen closely to Mozart and Debussy in order to hear a beautiful relation of slowness and speed. And the way I used these opposites began to change in a way that made me relieved and proud.

Aesthetic Realism is the philosophy that has been able to show the fundamental likeness between the arts and sciences. And teaching science in an arts high school, I see the importance of that fact every day. For my students to be hearing the arts they study and care for related, through the opposites, to a science lesson is a tremendous thing, bringing out their ability to learn. I asked the class about the opposites we were seeing in digestion, “How important is timing in music?” “Very important,” said Danny, music major. “What would happen, say, to Beethoven’s 5th Symphony—if it was played too slowly or too fast?” “It would sound awful,” Corinne said. I asked, “As in the way food is digested, is there such a thing as a right relation of lingering and swiftness in playing any instance of music—a relation that is the same as justice to the piece?” “Yes,” they said. My students had looks of great pleasure as they thought about this.

III. The Journey Continues, and We Come to the Great Opposites of Affecting and Being Affected

As the food leaves the stomach, it travels next through the small intestine. It is called small, because it’s only about an inch wide, but it is nearly 21 feet long in an adult. We saw that as the passage of food in the small intestine slows down greatly—it takes 12 hours—it is worked on with terrific intensity by the digestive fluids secreted by three accessory organs—the liver, gall bladder, and pancreas. Bile, which is produced in the liver and stored in the gall bladder, starts working in the small intestine changing large droplets of fat into smaller ones. The pancreas secretes enzymes that continue to break down carbohydrates, proteins and fats.

Then, after food has been completely digested, is the work over? No, the body now has the job of absorbing needed nutrients. And we saw the small intestine is uniquely suited for this task. Fingerlike projections about 1mm high called villi are located on the lining. These villi, which are covered by microvilli, greatly increase the surface area for absorption of nutrients into the body.

After digestion has been completed, indigestible wastes move into the large intestine, which is about 2” wide and 5 feet long, where they remain for nearly five hours. During that time, precious water that had been added to food from the mouth, stomach and small intestine is absorbed back into the bloodstream. By the end of 21 hours from having taken in a meal, nutrients have been absorbed and wastes are expelled from the body. Hearing this, the class cheered!

I asked the class, “Do you think there is a beautiful power present in digestion?” They said there is. Charles commented, “The body changes the food we eat—that’s power.” Yes, the body has power over the food it takes in, has an effect on it; but at the same time the body has another power: the power of BEING affected as it gets renewed strength from the food: glucose and fat for energy; amino acids and proteins for growth; fats and cholesterol for new membranes. Every day, people make a dangerous rift between these opposites—a rift Mr. Siegel once described in me, saying that I “associated power with being a hammer.” This was true; I wanted to have an effect, but not be affected. The digestive system is wiser!

As we were speaking about the beautiful way the human body utilizes food that comes to us from the outside world, we talked about the fact that the earth can produce enough food to keep every person on this planet healthy and strong. And we also spoke about the shameful fact that people in this world are hungry, including school children. I respected my students for the way they showed their feeling about this. Javier said, “It’s very wrong that some people are so rich and other people are so poor.” And everyone in the class agreed with him.

The effect of lessons such as these made for enormous change in my students ability to learn. 94 % of theses students, who at the beginning of the semester had so much trouble learning science, passed the test on the digestive system. They loved being able to identify the parts and describes with accuracy, the job of each organ. Nancy, who had said she couldn’t learn science had a 55 on her first test, but did better and better as the term progressed, and got an 88 on her final exam. Javier, who used to leave the room in disgust, soon added greatly to discussions and got the respect of everyone in the class. And though he began the term with a failing mark he passed the course. Alex, who had worried about being able to remember the material, after a few weeks had his hand raised to answer practically every question. His first test grade was 42, but he got an 88 on the test on the digestive system. And all my students became kinder.

I passionately want science educators to learn of the Aesthetic Realism teaching method, so that the schools of New York State are safe, kind, and exciting places of learning!

*This article appeared in The Science Teachers Bulletin, Volume 68, Number 1, Fall 2004.
This is the official publication of the Science Teachers Association of New York State.