Dear Unknown Friends:

This issue is about the great, magnificently successful, vitally needed Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method. It contains a paper presented at an Aesthetic Realism public seminar. As educator Leila Rosen describes an instance of her use of this method in New York City high school classrooms, we see its logic, its kindness—and its results. They are results thirsted for by our nation.

This Takes Place

What should happen in America’s schools? Young people should be enabled to learn successfully, to welcome eagerly into their minds the world that the curriculum represents. “The purpose of education,” Eli Siegel explained, “is to like the world through knowing it.” Also: through learning, America’s students should become kind—not want to hurt each other, not be prejudiced against and cruel to people different from themselves. What I’m describing could sound idealistic—it’s so far from what is occurring across our land. And yet it is actual: it happens through the Aesthetic Realism teaching method, as Ms. Rosen’s article makes clear.

The basis is the following landmark principle: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.” Through it, students see that a subject taught in a classroom is really about them, about their hopes, and their worries. They see that the subject presents the world itself as something to respect and care for. They see their likeness to people they’d thought were very different from them; and they get a solid sense of the largeness of every human being. All this, the article of Ms. Rosen illustrates.

What Has Interfered

I am going to describe why this teaching method is not yet being used all across America. The reason is the same reason why, over the centuries, ways of seeing that brought new justice to reality, science, art, and human beings, have often been opposed by individuals who felt this new justice would lessen their superiority and supremacy. So there was resentment of such people as Galileo, Keats, Darwin, Martin Luther King—and Eli Siegel.

What has interfered with Aesthetic Realism’s being known is the fact that various individuals, including some with “authority” in certain fields, see that they themselves need to learn from Aesthetic Realism—including about their own fields and their lives. And they take that lovely fact as a threat to their self-glory.

Further, Aesthetic Realism and its teaching method make for an ever-increasing respect for the world and people—as one can see in Ms. Rosen’s account. But this fact infuriates persons who, though they may act noble, hate the idea of respecting widely, accurately, and in a large way.

Aesthetic Realism explains that the big fight within everyone is between the desire to respect the world and the desire to have contempt for it. A principle of the Aesthetic Realism teaching method is that contempt for the world is the thing within a person which interferes with learning. Contempt weakens our mind and life. It is “the addition to self through the lessening of something else.”

Finding respect uncomfortable, trying to get away from respecting things and people, is the most unintelligent thing one can do. The seeing of contempt as necessary for one’s personal glory, is the stupidest, meanest thing in self. We meet this hate of respect and this intense treasuring of contempt in certain high-placed politicians; but it is in other people too (perhaps more decorously). And the hate of large respect is the thing that has had some persons keep from millions of America’s students the teaching method these young people ache for and deserve.

Meanwhile, this teaching method goes on resoundingly, vibrantly, strengthening students’ minds and lives, and is immortal.

Since Ms. Rosen tells of an English class and poetry, we precede her discussion with maxims having to do with education, words, poems. They’re from Eli Siegel’s Damned Welcome: Aesthetic Realism Maxims, and have, at once, depth and charm.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

8 Maxims by Eli Siegel

Knowledge Wins; Prejudice Ends

By Leila Rosen

After many years as a New York City teacher, I say with urgency: The Aesthetic Realism teaching method is the means for students to learn successfully—and be increasingly kind, rather than angry and prejudiced. That is because Aesthetic Realism explains the purpose of education: to like the world through knowing it. And it understands the self—both the deep, even desperate, hope to feel the world makes sense, and that in a person which stops him or her from being able to learn: contempt for the world.

I’ll tell about a lesson I taught in my 10th grade English class at a Manhattan public high school. As these students learned about poetry through the Aesthetic Realism method, their prejudice and hurtful anger changed—and were replaced by respect and kindness.

The students had reason to be angry: to worry about having enough money for food and rent, to fear being caught in crossfire walking home, are things no one should have to endure. But Aesthetic Realism explains that a just anger at being seen and treated unfairly can be accompanied by, and turn into, unjust anger and contempt: the desire to get revenge on the world, mock it, feel separate from it and other people. This anger-and-contempt stops a person from wanting to take the facts of the world into one’s mind—to learn.

Aesthetic Realism explains that we need, for our self-respect, to have emotions we’re proud of, and we can learn how through seeing what poetry is. I am tremendously grateful to have learned from Aesthetic Realism that the difference between a true poem and writing that may look like poetry but is really insincere and inaccurate, is the difference between beauty and ugliness, between seeing that is on behalf of life and seeing that is corrupt. Because, like thousands of students today, I didn’t learn this in school, I was impressed by a way of using words that made me more cynical and deeply less alive. Ellen Reiss, who teaches the thrilling course The Aesthetic Realism Explanation of Poetry, writes:

Poetry is not just the putting forth of feeling. Poetry comes from that strict and lovely thing most needed and so lacking in people’s lives: emotion which, while one’s own, is exact about an object and fair to the whole world. The thing that hurts people every minute of their lives is that their feelings are not just to the world itself. [TRO 860]

Eli Siegel, whom I respect enormously as literary critic, explained that poetry is “the oneness of the permanent opposites in reality as seen by an individual”—and the sign of its authenticity is poetic music. My students were learning that the way of seeing in poetry is a criticism of prejudice; because prejudice is contempt for difference, and true poetry—being exact about the world—presents sameness and difference as beautifully inseparable.

Most of the students in this class spoke Spanish as their first language. Others were African American, and some were from the West Indies, the Indian subcontinent, and China. While I saw a few friendships between students of different backgrounds, there was much anger and prejudice, which showed in insults, mocking comments, dirty looks.

We met during 10th period, and early in the term so many students came late and there was so much talking that it was nearly impossible to begin a lesson on time. Manuel and Stanley* would hang out in the hall with headphones on until quite a while after the late bell, then wander in slowly. Tania and Eneida would begin fixing their hair once they arrived. Others would have conversations about their experiences that day. Yet as they began to learn that every aspect of the class’s curriculum—the history of words, the structure of sentences, the characters in a novel—put together opposites like rest and motion, hardness and softness, the same opposites they were trying to put together in themselves, these students started to come on time and get ready for class right away.

One day, Tanisha James said to some Asian students in the class, “No offense, but my mother said that when she hears Chinese people talking to each other, it sounds like they’re arguing.” Some students giggled, and most of the class was clearly uncomfortable. I asked her, “Why do you think a person might say that?” Tanisha wasn’t sure. I asked if she felt people who spoke other languages were like her or different. She said, “Different.” Then, after a pause, “—but also the same.”

We discussed how, in prejudice, a person uses the difference of someone to lessen and feel separate from that person, but in poetry, the way different sounds are combined has us see greater meaning. As one sound is close to another but individual too, as a harsh sound meets one that is gentle, they make for music and deep feeling. That happens in a line my students liked very much, from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18: “Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May.”

Different Languages Have the Same Opposites

We talked about how sounds are heavy and light, harsh and gentle, separate and joined in all the languages spoken by people in the class: Urdu; Spanish; Haitian Creole; Cantonese and Mandarin; as well as English. “People for centuries, in every country, have wanted to give beautiful form to their feelings through poetry,” I said. “If you were to hear poetry in another language, while you might not understand it, do you think you would be hearing the opposites?” “Yes,” they replied. I felt it was important for us to study a Chinese poem, and I brought in one I love. It is by Li Po, who lived from 701 to 762, and in its great English translation by Ezra Pound is titled “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter.”

What we saw was based on this principle stated by Eli Siegel: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” In the poem, opposites that affect all people—closeness and distance, being together and being separate, sameness and difference—are musically one.

Students gave examples of how closeness and distance have confused them. “You can want to be close to some people, and distant from others,” said Kelvin. I asked, “Can you also be confused by the way someone who seems close, or should be close, is distant?” “Yes,” he answered, with a sigh. “That’s what I feel with my best friend,” commented Sandra: “sometimes she just won’t open up to me.” Maritza added, “That also happens with your family—like, you don’t understand each other, but you live in the same house.” People were nodding in recognition. In this poem, I said, an important thing occurs: the writer, a man, tries to understand what a young woman feels, and he gets so close to her feelings that he expresses them, using words that are sincere and musical.

I told the poem’s story. A girl of 16, writing to her husband, describes her feelings about him, for and against: during their childhood together; in the early days of their marriage; her coming to love him; her sorrow at his being away, working on the river; her longing to see him. I asked, “Is this feeling of over a thousand years ago in China at all like what you could feel—yearning for a person who is far away?” “Yes,” Tania said; “my boyfriend is in the Dominican Republic and I miss him very much.” The class wanted to hear the poem:

Separation & Junction, in Poetry & Life

A colleague at school, who is from China, had given me a copy of the poem in Chinese and kindly recorded himself reading it. Handing out copies of the translation, I asked whether the class wanted to hear the English or Chinese first. “The Chinese!” they said right away. As I was preparing to play the recording, students asked if Shu Wa Liang could read it instead. He had been in the US less than two years. He was separate, felt different from his classmates, and had been quiet all term. When I showed him the poem in Chinese, he was so pleased. He proudly came to the front of the class, and as he read, the rest of the class listened with wonder and respect. They were very moved, and wanted him to read it again. As he did, we looked at the Chinese characters on the page.

“What did you hear?” I asked. “The sounds go high and low,” one student said. “There was a space in each line as he read it,” said another. We looked at the English translation, great as poetry in itself, and discussed how closeness and distance, sameness and difference, are together in both meaning and sound. About the beautiful line “At fourteen I married My Lord you,” I asked: “How is this line a oneness of closeness and distance?” “When you get married,” said Yahaira, “you get close to a person.” I asked what they felt about how the phrase “My Lord” was placed in the line. They felt there was respect in it. And they saw that we hear the respect in the way words are separate and joined. For instance: “What would happen,” I asked, “if the line were, ‘At fourteen I married you My Lord’? It’s the same idea.” “No!” said Tania—“that doesn’t sound as nice.” She was right; the phrases seem jammed together, and the largeness is gone.

The students saw that the opposites we were speaking about also have to do with something that causes trouble in relationships. Maritza said that when you’re close to someone “you can be too possessive.” Possessiveness, we saw, is not honest closeness, because when you feel you own someone you’re really far away from what the person feels. I said I learned that when you truly care for someone, you feel close because you want to know him, yet you also feel there’s a great deal that’s yet to be known, that’s still distant from you. This feeling has respect. The pauses in the line seem to represent such a feeling. There are three: “At fourteen || I married || My Lord || you.”

The young woman in the poem is not trying to sum up her husband, own him. Just after she says something so personal, “I married,” there is something big—the impersonal phrase “My Lord”—and only then, the intimate “you.” Does this line, in its sound and meaning, stand for what we want in our relations to people?” My students felt it did.

As we discussed many lines closely, they cared for the poem more and more. And there came to be a new care for each other. People respected Shu Wa, and he was more at ease with them. Students of different backgrounds became much friendlier. That included Tanisha, who earlier had wanted to mock the sounds of another language.

I was very moved by how my students changed throughout the term. They were successfully learning! They asked many questions. And they showed a deep, new respect for words—and for people.