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The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method

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Dear Editor, 

     There is an answer to the crisis in education and to the devastating effects on children's minds of the poverty so many are enduring today. It is the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method—and I have seen for more than two decades of teaching, from prekindergarten through high school, that this method works: students of every age and ethnic background learn successfully and care for each other more! 

     As one of the instructors of the biweekly class for teachers, "The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method," and an English as a second language teacher at P.S. 97 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in one of the poorest neighborhoods of New York City, I say it is a national emergency for teachers everywhere to know the Aesthetic Realism Method can end the failure, boredom and anger, and escalating violence in our schools. 

     Every day our economic system hurts the minds and lives of children. It is shameful that millions of young people in this wealthy country live in poverty. I despise our brutal economic system which sees people in terms of how much money can be gotten from them. For some persons to make huge profits and in doing so to force so many others, including children, to live in unbearable conditions, is a hideous violation of basic human rights and of human dignity, and it is sheer contempt. Contempt, I learned from Aesthetic Realism, is "the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it." 

     In the international journal The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, number 1221, Ellen Reiss, the Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism, explains with great kindness: 

The profit system has made millions of American children poor; has made children hungry and homeless; ... has encouraged millions of children to feel the world is an enemy. And it is hard to want to take into one's mind facts, subjects, knowledge coming from a world one sees as one's enemy. 

     Children deserve all the nourishment and care they can get. And their minds deserve what only the Aesthetic Realism Method can give them. Eli Siegel explained: "The purpose of all education is to like the world through knowing it." And it is emergent for students to see every day evidence through the subjects they are learning—reading, history, math, science—why this world, despite the unjust way people may run it, is made in a way they can respect. 

     Through this principle, which Mr. Siegel stated, teachers can provide this evidence: "The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites." 

     I have seen young boys and girls, some of whom were so angry they could not learn, become able to take letters, words, facts into their minds when they see, through each subject, the world has friendliness and beauty in it they had not seen before! I have seen students, as young as six, furious and desolate, get new hope for their lives and happily learn. They see they do not have to use what they endure to hate everything. They see that with all they may be up against, it is better for them to know the world and be kind to other people. This is front page news! 

      I represent many teachers throughout the New York City area who see every day in our classrooms the success of this method. 

Sincerely, 
Patricia Martone 

  February 24 - March 2, 1997