The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method Explains Why Students Don't Learn --And How They Can!

By Ann Richards

I want every teacher to know the answer to learning difficulties. The beautiful, sought-after answer is in the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method. The American educator Eli Siegel founded Aesthetic Realism in 1941; his philosophical thought is the basis of this method which is taught in New York City in thrilling and ground-breaking bi-weekly workshops for educators at the not-for-profit Aesthetic Realism Foundation. In my thirteen happy years as a New York City teacher I have seen unequivocally—Eli Siegel has explained with infinite kindness and clarity what stops students from learning and how, with real ease and great pleasure, they can!

Eli Siegel scientifically explains the cause of a person's inability to learn—it is contempt, the "disposition in every person to think he will be for himself by making less of the outside world." (Four Statements of Aesthetic Realism, 1967). Students can feel, furiously, in a world that has racism, where it is so hard to make enough money to live, where your family cannot afford to pay for a doctor and medicine, that you are smart not to be affected by things- that reading, writing compositions, or studying grammar is useless junk, a waste of time.

Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism Ellen Reiss explains with compassion in her commentary in The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known #1184:

[Contempt] is the cause of all learning difficulty; for there is a feeling in people, This messy world is not good enough to get within me. Peter, age 10, now looking at letters, does not see what they spell -- because he unknowingly feels they are representatives of a world he should despise and keep away from.

Many of the students in my freshman English class at Norman Thomas High School have seen their families struggle just to get by; some have even seen people killed on the street, and they are worried about their own future. When students walked into the classroom, I saw two things—they sized each other up suspiciously, ready to be against somebody, insulted by a look; and there was also a general dullness and weariness in these fourteen and fifteen-year-olds. Julissa sat staring listlessly in front of her and when I asked her a question she looked at me and said nothing at all. In both their outward anger and their retreating, I saw they had already made up their minds that this world was against them- and the way to take care of themselves was to be against it.

Many had trouble reading and retaining what they read. For example, when reading aloud Sonya and Miguel often would say correctly the beginning of a two or three syllable word, but then, not understanding, make up the rest. Some students, coming across a word they didn’t know, would get a look of fear, say “whatever,” and go on. Arnold Cintron loudly groaned, partly in scorn and partly in real pain, at any suggestion of reading or writing: "Do we really have to?"

What would have my students like words, see them as mattering, and want to get them in their minds—to read with pleasure and excitement? I learned, and this is the basis of the method I am proud to use, that no matter how cynical, indifferent, scornful, against the world a young person is, his or her deepest desire is to see value in the world, to be honestly for it, to like it as much as possible. Aesthetic Realism explains that “The purpose of education is to like the world” (Self and World, 5). Every subject in the curriculum is a means to do this, and that was my purpose as my 9 th grade English classes studied the drama with this great principle stated by Eli Siegel as our basis: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” (Four Statements of AestheticRealism, 1967).

For and Against; Closeness and Clash—in an American Play and Us

To show the effect of the Aesthetic Realism teaching method I now describe what my ninth grade English classes learned as we read and discussed William Gibson's 1959 play The Miracle Worker. In it we meet the child Helen Keller who as a baby is able to hear and see, but through a terrible illness at one and a half becomes deaf and blind. Her life changes with the coming to her home in Tuscumbia, Alabama of a young woman from Boston, Annie Sullivan, who as a child was herself blind. After tremendous struggle, frustration, times she is ready to give up—and often with opposition from Helen’s own family—Annie Sullivan succeeds in teaching Helen Keller how to comprehend language, freeing the little girl from what Miss Keller described years later in her autobiography as “my long night.”(Keller, 9)

This play is a rich study in two big opposites which I have learned from Aesthetic Realism are at the very basis of drama—for and against or closeness and clash. And these are the same opposites my students were thirsty to understand. I wanted them to see they could be against something in the world accurately in order to be for the world and respecting it, not just be against everything sloppily, in a way that made them ashamed and hurt them. I knew it was an emergency for them to see that in order to respect ourselves, we have to be for and against things beautifully, in a way that makes us proud; and we can learn from this play about how! And as they saw that these are opposites that make this play so powerful they were able to read with deep comprehension, eager to discuss it, and to write clear, deep essays about it.

As we began the play I read to the class these sentences from Eli Siegel’s landmark lecture of 1951 “Aesthetic Realism as Beauty: Drama”:

In the drama there has to be some feeling of fight, however faint; but the fight is never of strangers; there is always, when drama is most dramatic, a fight of people who are for each other….The drama occurs any time we have this feeling of closeness and clash. Those are the two things: the cl’s: closeness and clash, with the clash and the closeness intertwining. It occurs in ever so many ways.

They saw that in Act Two, for and against, closeness and clash take place at the breakfast table. It is morning, the day after Miss Sullivan has arrived from Boston, and the family and new teacher are eating breakfast. We see that young Helen, now age 12, unable to communicate, has grown wild and tyrannical.

Captain Keller, Helen’s father, and his teenage son, James, who are talking and Kate, Helen’s mother, who is reading, are oblivious to Helen, who walks around the table, poking with her hand, grabbing scrambled eggs out of plates as she finds them. But when she reaches for Miss Sullivan's eggs, she finds opposition and the two struggle over the plate. I asked the class, “How does the playwright present for and against, closeness and clash in this scene?” Helen is grabbing at Annie Sullivan’s plate, and Miss Sullivan grips her wrists—

Kate: (calling) Viney! I'm afraid what Captain Keller says is only too true, she'll persist in this until she gets her own way.

Keller: Viney, bring Miss Sullivan another plate--

Annie: (stonily) I have a plate, nothing's wrong with the plate, I intend to keep it.

James: Ha! See why they took Vicksburg?

Keller: (uncertainly) Miss Sullivan. One plate or another is hardly a matter to struggle with a deprived child about.

Kate: You don’t know the child well enough yet, she’ll keep—

Annie: I know an ordinary tantrum well enough when I see one, and a badly spoiled child—

James: Hear, hear.

Arnold Cintron said, “This is a fight!” “Right,” I said. “And where are for and against in the lines we just heard? Captain Keller is seemingly for Helen in allowing her to have Annie’s plate.” “Yes,” Maggie Martin said, “Captain Keller thinks Helen should just do whatever she wants, and Annie Sullivan thinks she should get some discipline."

"Do you think that plate stands for the world?” I asked. “Are they arguing about how Helen should be encouraged to treat the world—to do whatever she likes with it or try to be fair to it? Is the closeness and clash about whether the world, which it could seem has been so harsh to Helen, still deserves her respect?" "That's right!" said Tamara Daniels excitedly.

I asked the class, "Why does Miss Sullivan think Helen should eat out of her own plate sitting at the table like everyone else? Just to control her, or is it something deeper?” “Yes, she wants her to have some respect!" said Alfonso.

"Why?" I asked. "Does she want Helen Keller to do something different from grabbing with that hand? Does she want her to use herself to know things? With all the fighting, is she very much for Helen? In the play she says to Captain Keller, ‘I treat her like a seeing child because I ask her to see, I expect her to see….’ Who is kinder to Helen, Annie Sullivan or her parents?" I asked. Dennis Wilkins said, "Her mother--she loves her." "No!" Tamara Daniels said, "Annie Sullivan is. She was blind herself so she knows how she feels. She doesn't want her to be spoiled—she wants her to learn. That's kinder!”

I asked, “Are we interested in Helen Keller because we feel, even while she is different from us, we are like her? Do you think she lashes out because she is so angry and pained that she can’t make sense of the world or herself? Have we ever felt anything like that?” “Yes,” they said, and the whole class was taking part, including Julissa, who had been so mute.

Go to Part Two