Educational Method Is Poetic

On March 14, 1973 Eli Siegel gave the lecture Educational Method Is Poetic. In issues of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known # 1448 – 1457 this lecture is serialized, together with commentaries by editor Ellen Reiss as well as articles by teachers, and more.  This important series shows (1) how classroom education is related to things that usually seem separate from it, including love, economics, and friendship; and (2)  how children can successfully learn, how  teachers can effectively teach, how the growing difficulty learning and increasing anger in schools can be things of the past.

These issues of TRO are about the principle which is at the very basis of the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method: The purpose of education is to like the world through knowing it. And they tell how that, too, is the largest purpose of everyone's life. Every subject in the curriculum, every fact taught in a classroom, is a means to like the world.

This is the educational method which for decades has succeeded magnificently while other approaches have failed and while schools have increasingly become places of anger and non-learning.

Educational Method Is Poetic
by Eli Siegel

"Education: Ethical and Beautiful"  / January 3, 2001;  Issue #1448

"Education and Friendship"  /  January 10, 2001;  Issue #1449

Aesthetic Realism is that in the history of thought which not only explains the purpose of education, and the purpose of friendship and love, but shows their purpose is the same! ... The structure of that world which we were born to like and which can so confuse us is in every aspect of every subject of the curriculum; and it is also in a person we might talk with over coffee, or embrace.

"Education, Economics, & a World to Like"  /  January 17, 2001;  Issue #1450

The world in which economics takes place — in which work goes on, and people live, and things are needed, manufactured, bought, sold — is the same world all education is about, and it should belong to every child, and every person. The basis of our economy should be in keeping with the purpose of life itself and education: for all people to be able to know and like the world. Because economic activity over the centuries has had a different basis, it has made for vast misery.

"Education & What Every Child Deserves"  / January 24, 2001;  Issue #1451

Mr. Siegel is the philosopher who explained something educators have sought after: the relation among all the subjects of education. 

"What Education Is For"  /  January 31, 2001;  Issue #1452

Every subject in the curriculum, every fact taught in a classroom, is a means to like the world, because it is evidence that reality is made well: the object of study, like the world it is of, is a oneness of opposites — such opposites as sameness and difference, motion and rest, the known and the unknown, freedom and order. And these opposites are in us — maybe confusingly, tumultuously.

"Education, Large and Warm"  / February 7, 2001;  Issue #1453

"Education, Ambition, & What Millions Like"  / February 14, 2001;  Issue #1454

If we accumulate a lot of information, are replete with degrees, yet through them do not care more for the reality all learning is about, we are really uneducated.

"Education, Attention, & Love"  / February 21, 2001;  Issue #1455

"For Education to Fulfill Its Purpose"  /  February 28, 2001;  Issue #1456

"The Greatest Encourager of a Person's Mind"  /  March 7, 2001;  Issue #1457

"Aesthetic Realism" writes Eli Siegel, "presents the tying together of all the subjects in the New School for Social Research or in any school.  Whether you learn how to make a rowboat or you learn Greek meter, you are trying to like the world."

Includes article by science teacher Rosemary Plumstead (LaGuardia HS, New York City) on teaching a lesson about blood to "gifted" and "talented" students.

Leila Rosen, English Teacher, Aesthetic Realism Associate

Read: "The Success of the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method: Liking the World vs. Contempt"

Alan Shapiro, Aesthetic Realism Associate, Jazz Pianist, Music Educator

Read: Aesthetic Realism and Music Education: "Difficulty and Ease in Wagner’s Liebestod"

Barbara Allen, Aesthetic Realism Consultant and Flutist

Read: “The Beginnings of Music: The Opposites in the Flute”

Distance Education Online: An Index for Educators

Terrain Gallery at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation: Papers on Art History and Criticism

      The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known online