Dear Unknown Friends:

This issue is about school in two ways. We print part of a paper by New York City teacher Barbara McClung, from a public seminar of this January titled “The Answer to the Fury and Failure in America’s Schools: The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method.” And the fact that the Aesthetic Realism method is that tested, beautiful answer constitutes news as big as any in this world! Here also are passages from a recently found manuscript by Eli Siegel: a composition written when he himself was a schoolboy, age 15½. In it we can see some of the thought-in-motion that would come to be Aesthetic Realism.

The composition is different from another early work of Mr. Siegel, written 5 months after it, and published in issue 365 of this journal: a letter to his friend A.D. Emmart. That letter to “Addie” is joyful and erudite. In it, the not yet 16-year-old Eli Siegel writes about authors he cares for; about the fact that he has finished reading the complete works of Shakespeare; about the relation between the biblical story of Adam and the Greek myth of Pandora; about why Isaiah is a true poet. And he writes this, about a purchase (he had very little money):

At last! At last! Finally! Finally! I have bought some books …. I don’t have to get the best editions …. In fact, I prefer old editions to new. The books I have bought are an edition of Shakespeare and a Goldsmith. The sums that I paid are very, very small. The Shakespeare is an old Globe of 1866, but good enough to be read …. If I get my share of shekels, I’ll buy an eighteenth century edition, with notes by Pope, Capell, Theobald, Warburton, Steevens, and Johnson, and like Macaulay, make comments on the margin. That is all of Utopia in this life that I want.

The high school composition, published here, seems to have been written in class, on a topic assigned by the teacher—”The Effects of the Coal Shortage and the Heavy Snow-fall”—and Eli Siegel’s manner is more formal than in the letter to Addie. It is Baltimore, February 15, 1918, during the First World War. One of the elements in this early work which stands for Eli Siegel all his life, and for Aesthetic Realism, is the desire to see with wholeness, to relate one aspect of the world to what else the world has—not see something isolatedly. So he relates, swiftly, the winter trouble he has been asked to write about, to a heat wave in Baltimore several months before. As years passed, Mr. Siegel’s work to understand how all things are related had him discover what he states in this principle: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.” And this principle is at the center of the Aesthetic Realism teaching method.

Present too in the composition is something Eli Siegel saw with tremendous clarity and feeling, and would write and speak about greatly: the fact that the world is owned unjustly—not by all people but by only a few. That there is poverty at all, he showed, is completely unnecessary and completely evil. The writer of this composition would become the philosopher who defined the source in the human self from which all injustice arises. It is contempt, the desire to get an “addition to self through the lessening of something else.” Our contempt, he showed, is also the great weakener of our minds. It is the thing in us which interferes with our ability to learn.

What Eli Siegel at 15½ writes about the municipality’s assistance to people, stands for something else he would express in coming years with might and passion and logic: there is something owed to every individual person from all people—and “all people” may take the form of a city, state, nation. He saw the idea of making profit from the life-needs of people as completely immoral, and also profoundly inefficient.

There is a lightsomeness, a charm, in this high school theme too. It is present in the way the trouble of “school-boys” like himself is placed with the transportation difficulties of others. And it is at the end, as something casual and earthy is noted along with matters of large seriousness.

Sixty years later, Mr. Siegel wrote the poem with which we begin: “The Unknown Should Be Good.” It is immensely lyrical. I think it is about what he showed to be the central matter in both education and life: “The purpose of all education”—and of our lives—“is to like the world through knowing it.” I think the person in dark stands for the world itself, which is our deep friend, our true love—even though we wrongly think we have more important things to do than try to know the world and be fair to it. Eli Siegel himself was faithful to that friend, reality itself, always: his desire to know it and be just to it was always passionate, and ever-young.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

The Unknown Should Be Good
By Eli Siegel

A School Composition, 1918

By Eli Siegel (at age 15½)

The Effects of the Coal Shortage and the Heavy Snow-fall

…The heavy snow-fall, occurring when there were uncertain fuel conditions, has materially affected the country. It differs in this respect from other unusual weather conditions. Nobody now remembers that for three days— from July 15 to July 17—Baltimore was sweltering in a temperature which was hardly ever exceeded in this city….But this heavy snow-fall has greatly affected our country in three distinct ways. These are: first, on Transportation; second, on Homes; and third, on Municipalities. The most serious effect, from the common point of view, was on transportation. At this time when every day is essential, the loss of one day in transporting war necessities is a great blow to the United States. The case was aggravated when a heavy snow-fall like the last fell. Not only did it impede transportation for one day, but, it may be said, for two and even more.

In the cities, of course, the trolley cars had a hard time of it, and the men who were accustomed to use them in going to their places of employment did also. Many others, among them school-boys, whose business required them to take a morning car, were in difficulties.

As to the second effect. Not all of the homes in the country suffered. As usual, the homes of the wealthy were immune. On the homes of the poor, fell the heaviest results… Those people who were without coal, or any other kind of fuel, underwent extreme misery…

Thirdly, as to municipalities. There is one notable result of the coal shortage, and it is one of which to be proud. Those people who found a closed door when they went to a private concern for coal, were partially satisfied through the efforts of the cities, if we take Baltimore as an example. How urgent was the demand for coal here, could be seen by the long lines which had formed at the stations in order to procure some of the precious fuel. Praise is due to the Mayor and those who aided him, for instituting a plan which, by selling coal to poor people at cost, saved them from untold wretchedness. This is an effect of the coal shortage which has placed the city in a new light.

The heavy snow-fall compelled municipal action in another manner, but it is an old story. There were, as there are after every snow-fall, men who performed the necessary task of making the streets easier for traffic and pedestrians. It may be noticed however that the snow-fall was so heavy that the regular street-cleaning force was not sufficient. Men employed by the city in other ways were conscripted for the purpose.

To mention any other results of both the recent conditions would be telling nothing new. Divining the common effects of a simultaneous snow-fall and coal shortage, such as injuries to telegraph wires and increases in profanity, does not summon any extraordinary powers into aid.

The Answer to the Failure

By Barbara McClung

Through principles that I have tested for 15 years—true, solidly scientific, and flexible enough to meet the most difficult situations—I have seen children who were despairing, angry, and failing change, learn their subjects, and come to have more feeling for people, including each other. The basis of all my classes is this principle which I love, stated by Eli Siegel, history’s kindest educator: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.” I teach 4th grade at PS 7 in East Harlem, and my students come from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Mexico, and Sierra Leone. Many endure things no person should have to go through. José,* for example, at age 9, has already lived in various homeless shelters.

I hate the fact that a child has to worry about where he or she is going to live; that often a student is forced to come to school without breakfast, or to wear thin clothes in winter. Meanwhile, I have also seen that young people are in danger of using the injustices they meet to feel the whole world is no good—and why should they learn anything from it?

When I first came to know these students, most often they talked loudly during lessons, lashing out at and mocking one another, or cursing when they saw an equation on the blackboard they didn’t understand. They had a terrific rage. Then, through a series of science lessons, they came to see that the world, with all its confusion, has a surprising and beautiful order. They saw that something they have to do with every day—water—has a thrilling relation of opposites, opposites they were desperate to make sense of in their own lives!

Water Changes and Remains Itself

I began by telling the class: “We live on a planet sometimes called ‘the blue planet.’ Do you know why?” As we looked at a photograph of the earth from space, Sonia called out, “It’s covered with water.” We learned that almost 75% of the earth is covered with water. And our bodies, too, are about 75% water! So there is a sameness between us and how the earth itself is made. I asked the class to name places where water is, and various students called out: “a lake”; “a river”; “a pool”; “a puddle”; “the ocean”; “an iceberg.” Looking at our text, we saw that water is always H2O—two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom—but it can change its form. It can be solid, as in ice; liquid, as in rain; and gas, as in steam or water vapor. It can be in air, under the ground, flowing on the surface—and it is still the same substance: water!

We studied how water changes and remains the same in the water cycle. The sun’s heat causes water in various lakes, rivers, and oceans to evaporate and rise into the air as vapor. When it goes high up in the sky, the air is too cold to retain the vapor, so it condenses into drops of water or crystals of ice. Millions of these drops or crystals form the clouds. Then water from the clouds falls back to earth in the form of rain or snow or even hail—and the cycle begins again. The water has gone through all these changes, yet scientists have figured out that the total amount of earth’s water is approximately the same as it was over 4 billion years ago.

I asked: “Does water do something we want to do?” The class looked surprised. “Do we hope to change, to be flexible and see new things, or do we want to stay exactly the same way we are right now?” I was very much affected when Rosa—a girl who had to go to the resource room every day for special assistance, and who felt stuck and felt her mind was slow—energetically called out: “I don’t want to stay just the same!” When she and the other students saw how water changes in so many interesting, wonderful ways and still remains what it is, the world looked friendlier, because they saw that opposites they had felt inevitably had to fight, could be one. And as the lesson proceeded, there was a different atmosphere in the classroom.

Oneness and Manyness

We learned that every drop of water is composed of even tinier particles, water molecules. We read in our science book, Discover the Wonder: “Water molecules cling to, or strongly attract, other water molecules.” José was thrilled seeing how the water molecules stuck together, and wanted to know how many molecules are in the tiniest drop. I showed the class a picture of the head of a pin with one droplet of water and read this sentence from our text: “On the pin above, the smallest droplet contains more than three hundred trillion water molecules.” “Wow!” they said. José had felt so tossed about having to live in many different places; he had felt that the world’s confusing manyness was ugly, with no sensible unity. When he saw how those trillions of water molecules make one drop, he felt that manyness and oneness could be beautiful in the world, and he was relieved.

These young people are changing! They remembered the facts we learned about water; and they are eager to see how the opposites are in other subjects and the world itself. There is Rosa, who had been so pained feeling she was stupid and would never learn: at the end of the semester, her mother told me gratefully, “She’s doing well—very different from last year! Thank you.”

I have a fury I’m proud of, that this magnificent educational method has been kept from the teachers and young people of America by persons in the media angry that they themselves need to learn so much from Aesthetic Realism. I love the Aesthetic Realism teaching method for enabling me increasingly to meet my students’ hopes: to learn their subjects, and also to become kinder human beings.