This website is maintained in honor of the life and work of Lois Mason.  In the September 19, 2007 issue of the international periodical The Right Of Aesthetic Realism to be Known, editor and class chairman of Aesthetic Realism, Ellen Reiss, wrote:
 

And here is what Lois Mason wrote for this website:

I have been a New York City high school social studies teacher since 1971.  I began this web page because I wanted other teachers to learn of the outstanding success the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method makes possible.  This method used by teachers in classrooms throughout New York City and elsewhere is based on these principles by the great American poet and critic Eli Siegel (1902-1978), who founded Aesthetic Realism in 1941.

	The purpose of education is to like the world through knowing it.
	The basis for using the facts of a subject to like the world is in this principle.  "The world, art, and self explain each other; each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites."  The opposites - high and low, depth and surface, sameness and difference - are in the facts of every subject and in every student and teacher.  And so they provide a deep, true relation between the facts of every subject and the self of every student.
	The greatest interference to learning is contempt, the "disposition in every person to think he will for himself by making less of the outside world."

I have tested these principles in every subject of the social studies curriculum, with students on every level of learning ability.  Simply, they are true, and enable students to learn the subject with excitement and ease. 

The papers I post here have been presented in seminars at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation and in national, regional and local social studies conferences in New York City, Washington D.C., Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and at staff development workshops in individual schools. And with my colleagues in All For Education, I am an instructor of the bi-weekly workshop in which teachers learn to use the Aesthetic Realism Method in their own classrooms. 

When I began my study of Aesthetic Realism in consultations in 1974 my primary concern was not my teaching, but my life.  And what I learned about how to see the world, myself, other people - including my students - has made me happy, proud, successful.  I studied in classes with Eli Siegel from 1976 until his death in 1978 and my education continues in classes for Aesthetic Realism consultants and associates taught by Class Chairman, Ellen Reiss. 

I am a representative woman.  Aesthetic Realism understood me.  It understands women.  And so this web page includes papers about the questions of women about love, success, what will satisfy us, how to see our mistakes and more.