Steven Weiner, Computer Specialist and Aesthetic Realism associate, writes:
With all the turmoil in our schools, what are our nation’s children hoping for most? How can the subjects in the curriculum really interest them, excite them? What can truly enable them to learn, and to value people different from themselves? Read the clear answers to these questions in “What the Schools of America Need Most!”—the current issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.
The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:
Dear Unknown Friends:
The important article by Rosemary Plumstead printed here was first presented at a public seminar titled “The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method Succeeds—& Answers the Question ‘Education—What For?’” Ms. Plumstead is an instructor of the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method workshop for educators, and she herself is one of America’s most distinguished educators.
Yes—this great teaching method succeeds, magnificently succeeds. Through it, at all grade levels, in environments of every kind, students learn—including those who had seemed unable to. And they become kinder. The Aesthetic Realism method is the most powerful opponent to bullying and racial prejudice in our schools. It is grandly effective.
I have said in this journal that the two things the young people of America need most are an America owned by all its citizens, and the Aesthetic Realism teaching method. I’ll say something about the relation between them.
The Purpose of Education
The Aesthetic Realism method is based on Eli Siegel’s showing that the purpose of education is to like the world through knowing it, and that to have this honest like of the world is the deepest desire of everyone. Meanwhile, there is another purpose in each of us, which is constantly at war with our deepest purpose. The second purpose is contempt: to get a “false importance or glory from the lessening of things not oneself.” One of the forms contempt has taken in human history is profit economics: the arrangement by which the wealth of a nation belongs chiefly to a few people, while millions of others have very little. The profit system is the arrangement by which a person—a boss, or stockholder—sees other human beings in terms of how much money he can pocket from their labor, how much of the wealth their work produces he can take for himself while paying them as little as possible…. >>Read more
>> And—there’s a tremendously important public seminar on education to take place this fall. Everyone who wants our schools and children to succeed should attend it! Click here for the announcement.