We Can Learn about Ourselves from Any Object–a Spoon, a Building, a Cell Phone!

Children meet all kinds of objects, and how they think about them is crucial to their whole lives. A child will exclaim excitedly, “Dad, look at that geode, it’s amazing!” Yet the next half hour, he or she may act aloof and bored about something: “I don’t like that, it’s stupid.” Or youngsters can be grabby with objects: “Give me that! It’s mine!”
Can young people look at objects in a new way, care for them respectfully, and also use them to learn about themselves? The answer is YES! That is what children will find out about in the Learning to Like the World class, conducted by Aesthetic Realism consultants Barbara Allen and Robert Murphy. In this exciting class, boys and girls ages 5-12 will see how even an “ordinary” object can be used in behalf of what Aesthetic Realism explains is everyone’s deepest desire, to like the world on an honest basis.
The teachers will take up with the children these important sentences by Eli Siegel, founder of Aesthetic Realism, from his Children’s Guide to Parents & Other Matters:
“Objects are what you have around you when you’re born and much later. You should be glad of this. Many people…are not glad when they have objects around them. They don’t like them. You, James, are thinking of something right now. It’s an object….All your life can be seen as made up of three Somethings: You, Something Else, and the Something that goes on between you and the Something Else. If you’re happy, these three Somethings will be well arranged. The arrangement will be beautiful.”

With logic and kindness, this class opposes the desire that a child (and adults) can have to dismiss objects, manage them, or find them boring. Youngsters will learn to see objects—including things they so often take for granted—as they never have before. They’ll see that that arrangement of themselves and that “Something Else,” the world, makes sense, is deeply friendly and worth knowing!