Through the Aesthetic Realism Method, Knowledge Opposes Anger -- and Students Learn

by Christopher Balchin

November 1, 2007

This paper was given as part of a public seminar at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York City.

Last year, as part of the social studies curriculum, I taught economics (H8) to three classes of seniors at Norman Thomas High School on East 33rd Street . The school is overcrowded and the atmosphere in the hallways and cafeteria is volatile. Students are angry for many reasons, including the fact that as tuition fees escalate, it's harder and harder for them to attend even a city college. Meanwhile, they see billions of dollars going to military spending, and government leaders who don't seem to give a damn about them and their future.

Nilda Castillo (I've changed the students' names for this public presentation) told me bitterly that her family had to move to a rougher neighborhood because their building was being turned into condos and they could no longer afford the rent. Jessica Roman, usually cheerful, who had perfect attendance to that point, missed two days of school and when she came back she was very subdued. She told me she needed dental surgery, but had no money, and couldn't find a dentist who'd give her the operation she needed. Many young men and women come into school extremely late or very tired, because they work four or five hours after school every day.

Early in the year Denise Williams would walk in late every day, mutter to herself, and talk back angrily any time I asked her a question. Fernando Ortiz, who had a reputation for getting into trouble, told me several times that he was about to have a fight. One day he came to class with his hand injured, saying he'd been so angry, he'd punched a wall. Another time, Denise walked to the back of the room and threatened to hit him. I had to call for security. As we say on our flyer, these young people felt cheated and were furious. Meanwhile, inwardly, they were screaming ‘Please don't give up on me!'” I wanted them to see that the study of economics was not as they had thought-—dull, dreary, and unrelated to their lives—but exciting and really useful to them. And I knew it would be by their seeing, through the Aesthetic Realism method, that ethics was at the very heart of our subject. I'll describe two lessons I gave showing this, the first on--

1. International Trade: Near and Far, One and Many
The students themselves were evidence for the fact that we live in an ever-more connected world: they come from many different places – the Dominican Republic, Mexico, China, Jamaica, Ecuador, Puerto Rico, Poland – as well as from right here in New York.

We read from the textbook Economics, Institutions and Analysis by Gerson Antell and Walter Harris, an illustration of how economically interdependent the world's nations are today. This subject brings up the crucial need for ethics, both between individual people and between nations. For example, there are the following sentences:

Consider the case of a candy bar that can be purchased over the counter at a local store. Suppose that the candy bar is one of the chocolate coated varieties with almonds . . . [T]he paper . . . was manufactured from wood pulp produced in Canada .

(Slides to follow soon)

I asked for a volunteer to mark the location of Canada on the map of the world. Diangelo Estevez came up and pointed to Canada, marking it with a piece of sticky tape. The text continues:

The aluminum foil was made of bauxite mined in Jamaica and processed in a US factory.

Jose Miranda and Jade Francis marked Jamaica and the US on the map. We continued to read, and the class's wonder grew as we marked every place mentioned on the map:

Sugar, the principal ingredient in the candy bar, was produced out of Filipino cane, while the chocolate had its origins in cacao beans that were grown in Ghana . The almonds came from southern Italy . In the candy-making process, many cargo ships brought the ingredients to the United States . One of these ships, built in a Japanese shipyard for a Greek company, sailed under Liberian registry with a mainly Indonesian crew.

  (slide)

The notable thing here, I pointed out, is that elements from so many different parts of the world, and the work of so many different people went into the making and transporting one item which they might buy at the corner store. Students were thrilled to see how the opposites of one and many, near and far were working together. “That's beautiful!” Nilda Castillo exclaimed. “All these countries going into one little candy bar!” And we discussed how this is true of other objects, including sneakers, jewelry, and a car – in fact, pretty much everything we use. I told my class that this has centrally to do with what Ellen Reiss wrote in an issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, in which part of Eli Siegel's lecture on Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations is printed:

[He] shows that as Smith describes the functioning of economics as such, he is describing...an underlying good will: for instance, the fact that one person produces what's needed by and can strengthen another; the fact that a nation, through what it exports, does good to the receiving nation and is in turn strengthened by products it imports from that second nation. ( The Right Of #1670)

  The class liked this idea very much.

“Meanwhile,” Ms. Reiss continues,

as the economics of the world has taken place, people have not been true to that underlying good will. They have had a motive contrary to it: the motive of contempt , “the addition to self through the lessening of something else.”  

In relation to this, I said: “Our textbook describes the many places involved in the coming to be of that candy bar, but in keeping with the ethics of our subject, how did the cacao beans get into the bar and the Filipino cane?” This made for a very lively and critical discussion. “What about the people who do the work!” said Diangelo Estevez with anger in his voice. He is one of the young persons who work five hours after school every day. Several other students commented on the fact that many goods produced today are made by people who are paid appallingly low wages, in sweatshops.

I asked the class, “What emotion should we have about them, these people who come from all these different countries, many with languages and cultures different from our own?” There had been suspicion and in some cases fights between students of different ethnic groups. “Thankfulness,” said Denise Williams, the young lady who had been so angry that many days she could hardly concentrate. “We should be thankful for what they did.” I was affected to see that both her gratitude and Diangelo's anger came from a desire to be fair to the people whose work went into producing the goods we depend on. They wanted those people to be seen and treated justly! It was after this lesson, that I noted a change in the atmosphere in the classroom--to one of more thoughtfulness and a desire to learn.
These young men and women, who had been so disgusted with the world, were seeing something new, beginning with the beautiful oneness and manyness of reality in that candy bar. We would learn more about these and other opposites in the unit I tell of now on unions.

2. The Beauty and Urgency of One Person Joining with Many

The central struggle in history and economics, I've learned from Aesthetic Realism, has been an ethical one which goes on in every person. The debate is: Do other people exist for me to know and see fairly? Or do they exist for me to use for my own superiority, comfort, and profit? This is the fight that we would see in a very intense way as we studied labor unions.

At the beginning of this unit, I saw most of my students did not have a clear picture of what labor unions are or why they came to be. Our textbook defines a union as “an association of workers seeking to improve wages and working conditions for its members.”

I asked “Why did people need an association for that? Why didn't someone just go to the boss and ask for help?” “Because he'd fire you,” said Carlos Reyes. We discussed the fact that many people together have a strength that one alone lacks. And that's what a labor union is based on. It puts together one and many—opposites we see in the union motto “An injury to one is an injury to all.”

This became vivid as we watched and discussed the powerful 1987 film Matewan by John Sayles, about the courageous struggle of workers in a small, coal-mining town in West Virginia . Through the Aesthetic Realism method, the ethics of this struggle became very clear to my students .

-Go to Part Two-