Steven Weiner, Computer Specialist and Aesthetic Realism associate, writes:

Read about the teaching method through which education succeeds! The method that brings out a child’s desire to learn—ability to learn—and desire to be just to, kind to, people different from oneself!

Read about the way of seeing young people that truly understands them—and all people.

Read about the purpose of education itself—and about what interferes with learning.

All this and more is in “Education & Justice,” the new issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

I know of no two facts about America’s schoolchildren more important than these: 1) Every child has the right to own America, and that includes America’s wealth. 2) Every child deserves the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method—the beautiful, kind method that grandly succeeds. While America’s children (and all Americans) do not own our rich land, and while young people cannot meet the Aesthetic Realism method—through which they could successfully, naturally, and so pleasurably learn—they are being rooked: robbed colossally.

In this issue is a paper by Barbara McClung, from a public seminar titled “The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method Brings Out a Child’s Ability to Learn—& Education Succeeds!” She is a much admired New York City public school teacher. And in this paper she describes teaching science to young people who had been seen (including by themselves) as quite lacking in ability to learn. She describes how, through the Aesthetic Realism method, these students did learn, eagerly and richly. You’ll see how boredom changed to agogness, and how a certain meanness to one another stopped.

What Learning Is For

The Aesthetic Realism teaching method not only works but is, as I said, beautiful. Eli Siegel is the philosopher who explained something neither educators nor their so often angry students have known: what learning is for. “The purpose of education,” he showed, “is to like the world through knowing it.” And he explained what, in a person, is the big interference with his or her being able to learn. The interference is contempt, the “disposition in every person to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world.” Mr. Siegel showed that contempt is the source of all injustice, whether to facts or people. Every item in the curriculum comes from and represents that outside world. And a student can be so angry and disgusted that, without being aware, he feels the world should not have power over him by getting into his mind. Contempt is also that which has a person look down on and be cruel to someone of a different race. And contempt is the basis of an economy that sees human beings in terms of how much monetary profit can be gotten from them.

Aesthetic Realism enables young people to learn not by having them feel they must pass a test (though through the Aesthetic Realism method students do pass tests ever so well). It enables people to learn because it shows that the world is, as Mr. Siegel once put it, “the other half of yourself.” Why it is that, Barbara McClung illustrates. The reason is in this principle: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites….” Read more

Also: Everyone who wants America’s children and schools to flourish will want to attend the thrilling public seminar described in this announcement.