I saw this on Rebecca Blood’s site. It’s a rather old piece from Harper’s titled On the Uses of a Liberal Education.

It’s a long read, but I found it very interesting. It describes, as Blood puts it, how “New York journalist Earl Shorris developed the Clemente Course in the Humanities, designed to use the classical liberal arts education to bring equity to the economically disadvantaged.” Shorris describes his motivation thus:

Numerous forces–hunger, isolation, illness, landlords, police, abuse, neighbors, drugs, criminals, and racism, among many others–exert themselves on the poor at all times and enclose them, making up a “surround of force” from which, it seems, they cannot escape. I had come to understand that this was what kept the poor from being political and that the absence of politics in their lives was what kept them poor. I don’t mean “political” in the sense of voting in an election but in the way Thucydides used the word: to mean activity with other people at every level, from the family to the neighborhood to the broader community to the city-state.

His solution: teach them Humanities: “the study of human constructs and concerns, which has been the source of reflection for the secular world since the Greeks first stepped back from nature to experience wonder at what they beheld. If the political life was the way out of poverty, the humanities provided an entrance to reflection and the political life.”

He puts together a course, bringing in Real Life Professors, to teach to ex-convicts, single mothers, drug-abusers, and AIDS victims. They read Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides. They read poetry, visit museums, watch slide shows of great art works. And it works:

One Saturday morning in January, David Howell telephoned me at home [about a dispute with a co-worker].

“Mr. Shores, she made me so mad, I wanted to smack her up against the wall. I tried to talk to some friends to calm myself down a little, but nobody was around.”

“And what did you do?” I asked, fearing this was his one telephone call from the city jail.

“Mr. Shores, I asked myself, ‘What would Socrates do?'”

David Howell had reasoned that his co-worker’s envy was not his problem after all, and he had dropped his rage.
…
In the last meeting before graduation, the Clemente students answered the same set of questions they’d answered at orientation. Dr. Inclan found that the students’ self-esteem and their abilities to divine and solve problems had significantly increased; their use of verbal aggression as a tactic for resolving conflicts had significantly decreased. And they all had notably more appreciation for the concepts of benevolence, spirituality, universalism, and collectivism.

It cost about $2,000 for a student to attend the Clemente Course. Compared with unemployment, welfare, or prison, the humanities are a bargain.

Now, it’s almost a cliche to gripe about the “state of our schools,” so I won’t do that.

Posted in uncategorized on May 4th, 2004 by Thibodeaux | RSS 2.0 |