I want your readers to know about an urgent and thrilling public seminar titled "The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method: Students Learn, Prejudice Is Defeated!", which will be given on Thursday, January 28, at 6:30 P.M. at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, 141 Greene Street in Manhattan. As a graduate of a New York City public high school, and now as a Technical Support worker for the Board of Education, I feel passionately the need for this teaching method to be used throughout our country’s educational system by teachers and administrators. 

     The Aesthetic Realism teaching method is a proven success, and this is what you will hear New York City public school teachers, who use it in their classrooms — from kindergarten to high school — tell about in this powerful seminar. Not only do students learn to read, and learn about the world through science, art, and history; but prejudice — that horrible, deadly means of making the insides, the feelings of another person different from ourselves unreal, and which leads to tragedy — ends. 

     This great teaching method is based on Aesthetic Realism, the true, kind knowledge founded in 1941, by the great American poet, critic and educator Eli Siegel. And a central principle of Aesthetic Realism which is crucial for educators to know is, "The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites." This seminar, will show 1), "the purpose of all education is to like the world through knowing it,"; and 2), children, no matter what their background, or past history of not learning, can indeed learn. 

     When I was a young student, if I had to learn a subject that didn’t interest me, such as math, I would gaze out the window and complain to myself, "This is boring, why do I need to know this stuff?" And I also remember looking at other students and feeling that I was better than that person, and that person was against me in some way. These attitudes, which prevented me from learning and made me mean and lonely, I later learned from Aesthetic Realism, were contempt, which Eli Siegel has defined as "the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it" and he showed is the cause of all learning difficulties. Contempt is seen as strength, but in fact it causes self loathing and weakens our minds. I didn’t know then what this seminar will show so beautifully — that every subject, from math to English composition, to history and science, can be used to like the world because it has the opposites of reality. The announcement for this seminar describes a ninth grade science lesson about the opposites of power and gentleness in the circulatory system: 

To keep us alive, the blood must have both: it rushes with great force through our wide, elastic arteries to every extremity of the body, carrying red corpuscles charged with oxygen from the lungs —  yet the arteries end in millions of finely-branching capillaries, which are delicate microscopic tubes. Through them, the same blood must flow very gently, corpuscle by corpuscle, to bring oxygen to each one of our 60 trillion microscopic cells. 

Shawn and Daniel, who had constantly fought with each other, were amazed! They had thought gentleness was for suckers while power was the ability to demolish an enemy. Here in the bloodstream, they saw these opposites which so tormented their lives working together beautifully!

     I urge teachers and parents and every person concerned about the future of education and young people to attend this thrilling seminar, because it will show that the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method is the answer to the crisis in education!