Education & What Every Child Deserves

     Here is the 4th part of the great, historic Educational Method Is Poetic, by Eli Siegel. In this 1973 lecture, Mr. Siegel shows that education is, richly and elementally, a oneness of opposites — the same opposites that art makes one; the opposites that are also fundamental, puzzling, often tumultuous in our lives. "All beauty is a making one of opposites," Mr. Siegel explained in a principle central to Aesthetic Realism, "and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves." In the part of his lecture published here, Mr. Siegel begins to speak of the scientist Robert Boyle as a means of showing what education is.

     I am among those who consider Eli Siegel the greatest of educators. He showed the grandeur, the beauty of learning, and he also had one see and feel its tremendous warmth and friendliness. He enabled me to love knowledge, and I represent many people; I represent humanity. His own love of knowledge was passionate, graceful, all-inclusive, and constant. In this lecture, there are lightness and humor as he says things of landmark importance. He describes, for instance, how religion and science are alike; the relation of science and art; the likeness of literary style and physics. 

     Mr. Siegel is the philosopher who explained something educators have sought after: the relation among all the subjects of education. He explained the relation among all the things reality has. It is the oneness of opposites. That is the basis of the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method and why it has succeeded magnificently in New York City public schools — even while those schools have been in turmoil and have been brutally impoverished. A child, seeing reality's opposites as one in a subject, sees that there is beautiful sense in that subject, and in the world. She also feels that what she is learning has to do with her very self. 

     For example, a chemical compound is, in the makeup of its molecules, a mighty oneness of the opposites junction and separateness or distinction. Through the Aesthetic Realism method, a child can see that: she sees an oxygen atom is more its distinct self, has its particular possibilities and usefulness come forth, through merging with two atoms of hydrogen. And as she does, the child feels surer she will be more herself, more a distinct individual, through knowing people and things different from her and feeling connected with them. She sees the structure of that water molecule as dear to her. She understands and remembers it. 

     Mr. Siegel is the philosopher who explained, too, the purpose of education: it is "to like the world through knowing it." And he identified the thing in the human self that interferes with learning: it is contempt, the feeling that the world is something not to care for, but to diminish as a means of enhancing oneself. Contempt can have a person acquire knowledge impressively but not be affected deeply, warmly, by it. And the seeing of the world as inimical and to be lessened can also have one not welcome knowledge of it into oneself: contempt can have one unable to learn. 

New York is the latest of more than two dozen states forced by courts to grapple with the perilous job of assuring that poor pupils get an education that passes constitutional muster, either by redistributing aid, thereby angering some, or tapping into separate funds, annoying others .... [Justice DeGrasse] gave the Legislature the Herculean tasks of helping New York City reduce class sizes, ... improve school buildings and acquire new books, computers and supplies. [11 Jan. 2001]

     And that the phrase "poor pupils" should be in a sentence with the sentence then simply proceeding quietly, is also crazy and awful. By the year 2001 in America, there should be no "poor pupils"! Every citizen should feel that if any child is poor it is an emergency — something that the nation must remedy immediately. 

     Eli Siegel was the educator who showed that the world — with its books, ideas, objects, people, numbers, words, history — should be rightly and lovingly in the mind of every person. And in his lifework, Aesthetic Realism, he provided the beautiful means. 

— ELLEN REISS, Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism

English literature has a great deal about education. Even the novels have: The Newcomes of Thackeray, and David Copperfield and Dombey and Son of Dickens — there are schools aplenty. And none of the schools at the present time seem good enough. 

     The history of education has been written from a factual point of view, but in terms of how people felt, it hasn't been written. Education went on in the 13th century; it went on in Jerusalem hundreds of years ago; it went on in Syria and in Egypt; went on in the Middle Ages — the method of having younger people told about the world. There's a Jewish song that is about that: "Oif'n Pripechuk," one of the most popular songs in Yiddish. It shows that education, long before the New York school system, went on.

     An interesting meaning of both religion and science is that your mind can be wide and deal with the unseen. The large question as to religion is: Are the things that make the world go, all seeable; or are there forces that are just as forceful that you can't see so well? And Newton, for example, pointed to a force which no one has seen: gravity. Gravity will not go on the stage because it isn't that kind of girl. 

     Let's take the life of Boyle, with its confusions. He is immortal, because there is something which is still called Boyle's Law. It's about pressure and elasticity. So what can you do if something about pressure and elasticity is called by your name? You've got to be immortal, that's all. 

Robert Boyle was the seventh son of Richard, first Earl of Cork ... and was born at Lismore Castle in Munster, on the 25th of January 1627. His education at home gave him a mastery of French and Latin .... It was at Geneva ... that he first experienced, at the age of fourteen, an impulse to religious meditation which never left him.

By the death of his father in 1644 [Boyle] inherited ... considerable wealth, which was ... devoted in abundant measure ... to the spread of scriptural knowledge, and to the aid of poor students of science.

In physics Boyle is of course renowned as the discoverer ... of the air-pump, and in a lesser degree for "Boyle's Law" of the relation between elasticity and pressure.

     "We may notice also his improvement in the thermometer, and his experiments in electricity." That is very early, because electricity needed the centuries. But there was some awareness that there was a force having to do with amber and wax called electricity. I'm sure if his name hadn't been used for Boyle's Law, he might have made himself immortal through electricity: something Edison sold might be called a Boyle now. 

He guarded himself carefully from even the knowledge of a priori theory which might lead to prepossessions inimical to the impartial conduct of experiment, save, one must suppose, in so far as hypothesis is absolutely necessary to the first stages.

     "[His] excellent work in science ... was rather due to an untiring persistence than to great gifts of intellect." In judging scientists, we find there are two things: one, care, caution even, persistency, being able to experiment and experiment some more; and then, the having of what can be called intuition. The reason that Newton is the scientist of the 17th century, or of any century, is that he had great ideas with a capacity for work. Those are two opposites. Boyle is described here as having greater persistence than gift of intellect. But he had a gift of intellect too, or he wouldn't be remembered, and he wouldn't have come to Boyle's Law. A work of his is in the Everyman Library. 

     "He had hardly a disinterested love of knowledge; he valued it as it 'had a tendency to use.'" And another thing is: how knowledge is good in itself, as Newman said, and how also it is useful. This is like art: art is useful, but is also what it is. 

     They are principal in education, and they've always been felt. There was a day when the students could do anything in a school, including keeping the schoolmaster out: it was called a barring out; it was part of the English educational way. And the feeling that both "culture and anarchy" are necessary is around. We find things corresponding to them. There's a sense of insight, something which comes to one, the feeling that there's a new symmetry in the world; and then also there's the being able to follow out a previous thought. In science you have to get to a thought you never had before, and you also have to learn how to develop a thought you've had. 

From the greater masters of sonorous English, Boyle was as far removed as from the clear-cut simplicity and directness of Swift. His style is not involved, and is not affected; it is merely rarefied and verbose.

     About Boyle's time, Christopher Wren tried to solve the problem of heaviness and lightness in St. Paul's Cathedral. Architecture has those two opposites, which all art has, and science has too. A gale, a hurricane, is a study in lightness and force. 

     So at this time we can ask, what had Boyle to learn? Every writer has something to learn. This is part of education in its fullest sense. 

*Henry Craik, ed., English Prose Selections, with Critical Introductions by Various Writers (1894), 3:63-64.

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