Escaping "The Surround of Force": How the Arts and Humanities Can Defeat Poverty
[This is a spin-off of an earlier thread “The Cost of Art vs. the Needs of Society” in the “Serious Discussions” forum:
http://www.online-literature.com/for...ad.php?t=57885
The previous thread asked whether poor people should have the same access to the arts as the wealthy and better-educated. This thread reopens that issue, by showing the specific example from an adult education program created at the Roberto Clemente Family Guidance Center in New York’s Lower East Side, a pilot project which henceforth came to be known as the “Clemente Course.”
Please read and reply to this thread. All replies- pro, “agin,” and in-between - are welcome; however, please follow the LitNet’s general rules forbidding specific discussions about current politics. Wherever the word “politics” appears in this particular thread, its use strictly follows the same general way as Earl Shorris uses it: not “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.”]
“Numerous forces –hunger, isolation, illness, landlords, police, abuse, neighbors, drugs, criminals, and racism, among many others–exert themselves upon the poor at all times and enclose them, making up a ‘surround of force’ from which, it seems they cannot escape. . .[T]his is what kept the poor from being political and that the absence of politics in their lives was what kept them poor.”
–Earl Shorris
Escaping the ‘Surround of Force’: How the Arts and Humanities Can Help Defeat Poverty
The September, 1997 issue of Harper’s Magazine contains a two-part feature, “On the Uses of a Liberal Education,” both elements of which are still acutely relevant thirteen years later. In the first part, “As Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students,” author and psychology professor Mark Edmundson reports on the ambience of the University of Virginia, a bellwether of so many undergraduate colleges today that are designed according to the desires of the marketplace, student rather than faculty driven, where the “prevading view is the cool consumer perspective, where passion and strong admiration are forbidden.” But it is the second part of the feature – “As a Weapon in the Hands of the
Restless Poor” by Earl Shorris-- which forms the basis of our discussion in this thread.
Three years into the writing of his eleventh book which was to become New American Blues: A Journey Through Poverty to Democracy, Earl Shorris found his focus completely transformed after he interviewed at an inmate at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. The prisoner, who “on the surface remained as tough as she was on the street” had nonetheless spent the time of her confinement completing her high school requirements, beginning a college education, and serving as a counselor to victims of both domestic violence and AIDS. There was a redemptive quality about the woman, impressing Shorris as one who “goes through life as if she had been imagined by Dostoevsky, but even more complex than his fictions.” Then Shorris asks her, “Why do you think people are poor?”
“You’ve got to teach the moral life of downtown to the children. And the way you do that, Earl, is by taking them downtown to plays, museums, concerts, lectures, where they can learn the moral life of downtown,” she replied. Initially, Shorris was so surprised by the answer he thought that he had misunderstood her response until she reiterated it–“What I mean is what I said–a moral alternative to the street.”
At that point Shorris realized that she didn’t mean jobs or money, yet he wondered how “the moral life of downtown” could help anyone escape the “surround of force”: “How could a museum push poverty away? Who can dress in statues or eat the past?” The link between “the moral life of downtown” and the public world– “politics” as Thucydides meant it –was “learning to reflect.” This is what the woman had achieved. “With no job and no money, a prisoner, she had undergone a radical transformation.” Like the ancient Greeks who had invented politics, she had “learned to reflect,” for the “moral life of downtown” meant the humanities,” the source of reflection. . .since the Greeks first stepped back from nature to experience wonder at what they beheld.” A course in the humanities could be the first step toward reflection toward the political life and thus serve as the "escape route" from poverty. But making this path to accessible meant eliminating the distinction between “the preparation for the life of the rich and the life of the poor.”
The rich, or the “winners in the game of modern society” as Shorris calls them, even those in the middle-class “have other means to power: they are included at birth. They know this. And they know exactly what to do to protect their place in the economic and social hierarchy.” When it comes to higher education, access to the arts, and all manner of sources of reflection, the children of the rich have no problem, and thus know politics as Thucydides defined the concept. According to Shorris, rich people “know how to negotiate instead of using force. They know how to use politics to get along, to get power,” which meant that “rich people know a more effective method for living in this society.”
For the poor, however, it’s a different ball game, with odds stacked against them not only by a rigged system favoring affluence but also by the atmosphere which Shorris calls the “surround of force.” Within that harsh world the poor face seemingly insurmountable obstacles when attempting to acquire the kind of knowledge to transport them to a world wider than that of the street. Lack of tuition is merely one of those obstacles; lack of academic preparation is another, perhaps as a result of substandard schools in poor neighborhoods, or more likely, of the overwhelming surround of force that insidiously encourages young people to drop out. The only way to bridge the cultural disparity between the rich and the poor is to offer the poor the same kind of intellectual opportunities which the rich automatically possess as a birthright, since they “learn the humanities in private schools and expensive universities,” which is the way “they learn the political life,” as the humanities help create an understanding of politics. A knowledge of the humanities helps a person “to live better and enjoy life more.” Not only that, the humanities will make one “rich”– “But not in terms of money. In terms of life.”
Thus the experimental course at the Clemente Center began. As a model, Shorris used the methodology created by Robert Maynard Hutchins from the University of Chicago, with Htchins’s insistence that “The best education for the best is the best education for us all.” The Hitchens philosophy required full professors teaching classes, and the Clemente Course in the Humanities would follow that lead, employing “a faculty with the knowledge and prestige that students might encounter at their first year at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Chicago.”
Naturally, because Shorris had no funds, he had to request of such highly qualified faculty members to donate their time and talent. He had relatively little trouble getting good teachers to sign on, among them a novelist who was also an editor at the New York Times Book Review as well as a former Columbia professor; an New York Times arts
critic well-versed in subjects ranging from cave paintings to contemporary art; and an expert in mathematical logic who had done graduate work at MIT. Shorris himself was to cover both the political philosophy and the American history sections of the course.
To Shorris’s surprise, it was much more difficult to recruit students for whom the experimental course would be appropriate. The prospective students needed only a few prerequisites for the course: they were to be in the 18-35 age range, their household income was to be below 150% of the official poverty threshold as outlined by the Census Bureau, and having achieved an educational level that enabled them to read a tabloid newspaper. Their only “educational goal” was “an expression of intent to complete the course.” Shorris enlisted the help of community activists to recruit students from among their clientele. (Sadly, some of the prospective students who were referred to the program could not be admitted because they were--believe it or not –“too poor.” Shorris himself did not want to believe it, “but it was true,” he says. “There is a point at which the level of forces that surround the poor can become insurmountable, where there is no time or energy left to be anything but poor.” Even when Shorris recruited people in such circumstances, they could not keep up with the course and soon dropped out.)
As Shorris wrapped up the interview process, he considered the conditions of some of the participants who had been accepted into the program, among them four former prisoners, three people who were homeless, three pregnant women, one who “lived in a drugged dream-state in which she was abused,” and one enrollee who was suffering the final stages of AIDS. Shorris experienced a brief round of second thoughts, as he worried about how the course would affect them: “They had no public life, no place; they lived within the surround of force, moving as fast as they could, driven by necessity, without a moment to reflect. Why should they care about fourteenth-century Italian painting or truth tables or the death of Socrates?”
Not surprisingly, another problem was funding. Shorris fight to raise money nearly failed, until a few sources finally surfaced, through the editor-in -chief of Shorris’s publisher, the publishing house itself, and support from a modest, though nonetheless generous, family foundation. In order for the participants to attend the program, they had to be assured that they’d be given subway and bus tokens, the cost at the time ranging from three and six dollars round trip for one class for each student, who could not afford even $30, let alone $60 per month for transportation. The program would also have to provide childcare, a meal, and all the books and learning materials. The total cost for each individual student in the course would run about $2,000 (in 1996 dollars),but as Shorris says, “[C]ompared with unemployment, welfare, or prison, the humanities are a bargain.”
What would be required from the students in return was not monetary but even more important. Shorris told the prospective students that they would be made to “think harder” and to “use your mind more fully, than you ever have before.” The commitment which they were expected to make was equally unprecedented: “You’ll have to come to class in the snow and the rain and the cold and the dark. No one will coddle you, no one will slow down for you.” Shorris assured them that there would be “tests to take and papers to write” with no promise of gaining anything concrete, other than a “certificate of completion at the end of the course,” which was to run from October through the following May with only a two-week break for Christmas and would consist of classes in “philosophy, poetry, art history, logic, rhetoric, and American history.”
After the interviewing process and the orientation class, the course began. Once again, Shorris’s worried that only a fraction of the thirty enrollees would actually show up for the first class abated when twenty-two would-be learners attended. Shorris began his philosophy segment by drawing a time line of history on the blackboard, followed by the first lesson: Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Rather than lecturing the students, Shorris employed the part of the Socratic Method called the “maieutic” dialogue, the term which – the students learned to their delight – derived from the Greek word for “midwifery.” Shorris describes the enthusiasm in the classroom as “a beginning of a love affair,” – perhaps with the freshness of a first love, as one of the students remarked that it was “the first time anyone had ever paid attention to their opinions.” (Italics mine.)
The art history professor took the class to the Metropolitan Museum of Art where the Temple of Dendur and the Egyptian Galleries thrilled the visitors. The poetry class was interactive, with readings not only of love poems written by established poets but also an impromptu recitation by a class member, whose original work fell “somewhere in the triangle formed by Ginsberg’s Howl, The Book of Lamentations, and hip-hop,” causing the poetry professor to pronounce, “The kid is the real thing.” The most “professional” of the professors introduced the students to truth tables and “logic problems stated in ordinary language,” spilling over after the class session had ended in which the students continued their discussion – “even more polite than it had been in the classroom, because now they governed themselves.” (Italics mine.)
As Shorris’s essay enters the home stretch, he relates how one of the students voluntarily telephoned him on a Saturday morning to tell him how he, the student, had nearly surrendered to his rage toward an envious co-worker who had made him “so mad” that he almost smacked her. The student told Shorris that since no one else was around to talk to help him to calm himself down, he remembered what he had learned in his philosophy class, asking himself what Socrates might have done in a similar situation. In a stunningly powerful way, the anecdote demonstrates the positive influence of the Clemente Course, in that the humanities course directly prevented a possible violent incident.
By the end of the pilot course in May, sixteen of the original thirty students had completed it, with some additionally earning college credit. The director of the Roberto Clemente Center “found that 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.”
In the following year of 1997, a second Clemente Course in the Humanities produced fourteen more graduates, and that fall an international version, focused on classical Maya literature began in Yucatan, Mexico. Since that first fledgling experiment fourteen years ago, the philosophy and the curriculum of the Clemente Course have found its way across the globe, from South Carolina to Australia, videos of which can be currently viewed on YouTube. New American Blues, the book that brought its author to the notion of creating such a course, was revised and reissued under the title, Riches for the Poor: The Clemente Course in the Humanities.
Today, as 2010 approaches its end with 2011 waiting in the wings, the United States of America is suffering through a historically-high unemployment rate, an epidemic of home foreclosures, jobs disappearing or “outsourced” overseas. The middle class itself is shrinking, with thousands of formerly comfortable wage-earners finding themselves one of the very people he might have once ignored, if not disdained. For the Poor who have always been with us, the elements of the Surround of Force have, if anything, gotten even worse than they were in 1996. The urgency of uncovering an escape route for the ever-increasing ranks of the poor has never been so crucial as it is right now. One way to find it is to follow the lead of Earl Shorris who launched an experiment that led to miraculous results.
So to repeat the statement made in the “Cost of Art” thread: The arts and humanities should be for everyone, not just for those who through sheer good fortune can afford them. Indeed, denying poor people equal access to the arts – and by extension, the political life as defined by Thucydides – is the one thing society cannot afford to do.
Source:
Shorris, Earl. “On the Uses of a Liberal Education II– as a Weapon in the Hands of the Restless Poor,” in Harper’s Magazine, Vol. 295, No. 1768 (September, 1997), 50-59.
(I strongly urge those interested in this topic to read the entire essay if you are able to obtain a copy. Inquire at your local public library to see if the facilities maintains bound copies of past issues of Harper's or its archives on computer files.)
