Escaping "The Surround of Force": How the Arts and Humanities Can Defeat Poverty

[AuntShecky]

[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.)

[Paulclem]

That's an interesting idea - the surround of force.

I work in Adult education in Coventry. We work with mainly learners aged 19+ - the oldest I know is in his middle 80's.

The learners we get, I suspect, have managed to break away from the surround of force - or were not subject to it in so severe a way as appeared in your post.

By the time they come to us, they have usually been able to deal the worst chaotic aspects of their lives, or they are having a stable time with their medication, or they have determined for themselves that they need the qualifications and skills we can offer them. Of course, many of them still have barriers to learning - low levels of literacy, a learning difficulty such as dyslexia, or they have forgotten much of what they learnt in school as they have been working in manual jobs which haven't stretched or rehearsed their skills. I would say that most of them need to re-learn, or, as is most likely, were never taught how to learn.

http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/Beginnings.html

http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies...n-the-Wall.htm

The links above refer to a project that was begun in India. Basically a computer was installed in a wall and left for anyone to have a go with it. He found that children benefitted most from it, creating their own terms for the computer icons - such as damaru - a hand drum - for the timer. Without any input from an IT literate person they were able to teach themselvs how to operate programmes on the computer.

Our service operates under Government funding - we have accreditation targets to meet like anyone, and we do get people through exams. These have to have currency with employers and colleges to be meaningful - and they do.

I also strongly believe, though, that it is about education in the broadest sense. There is no reason why art can't be discussed, books read or extracts studied, and work on basic English incorporated into that. I admire someone who can get an arts teaching course off the ground as an experiment, and get in very good teachers in their field.

I think teaching has to be competent in the sense of doing the necessary business of acreditation, but has to allow learning to take place - as in the Hole in the wall experiment. That's about allowing learning beyond the Tutor's narrow conception of it. How better to do this than by enthusing learners with good examples of art and literature?

The learner who comes to us once a week and does nothing in-between will achieve, but not nearly as much as those who are enthused, or who gain the vision of what education can do long term for someone. I rememer a learner I had who became really interested in the entymology of words. I was fresh from a course in which we had discussed the origins and development of the English language. I think she picked up on my enthusiasm for this particular topic, but you would never have guessed that she would have been interested.

I don't think there are quick fixes, but it needs a good strategy which includes some innovative teaching, the right kind of funding, recognition form the state, and support from learners own circumstances.

[LitNetIsGreat]

Aunty, I’m not surprised in the least to read about the positive impact that good education can provide, as is highlighted by Shorris here. I’m not surprised at all to read that the humanities can have a massive impact in a variety of other circumstances too, nor am I surprised to read of positives in regards to adult education. As someone currently at the end of a seven year, part-time degree in Literature, I have personally experienced such benefits myself.

It is clear to me, and I suspect many others, that the humanities is a life affirming and enriching subject. However, at the same time I work in a challenging school and encounter enough disaffected kids and it is not an easy thing to get them engaged or to “escape from the surrounding force” as it has been put here in anything. In many respects it is a vast uphill battle, if not all but impossible. You can not believe how close-minded kids from such backgrounds can be at the ages of 13/14 even. Everything is “boring” everything is “sh*t” and any time you try to help them, inspire them, even talk to them, you are likely to get “fu*k off” as a response. It is not as simple as saying “the arts and humanities should be for everyone” believe me.

I’m trying to remain positive, but I think this is one of my main problems with the article. I know and agree with the assumption but implementing it is an entirely different thing, especially considering what is happening to education now...You might as well post that war is wrong or that it is wrong for kids to be dying of starvation in Sudan – yes I agree but where is the solution?

[Paulclem]

There definately needs to be some motivation from within the Learner. Imposed programmes are difficult to make work. We will see this in the UK when the job cuts take hold and unemployed people are coerced into Adult Education classes for fear of losing benefits. The policy documents and discussions we are seeing point to this.

In Aunties example, there must have been some motivation from the Learners themselves to enrol.

[Scheherazade]

You can not believe how close-minded kids from such backgrounds can be at the ages of 13/14 even. Everything is “boring” everything is “sh*t” and any time you try to help them, inspire them, even talk to them, you are likely to get “fu*k off” as a response. It is not as simple as saying “the arts and humanities should be for everyone” believe me.

I don't think this is a phenomenon that is particular to teens from these backgrounds. Most teens (and adults) fail to engage in studies unless they see the relevance of it in their daily lives.

There definately needs to be some motivation from within the Learner. Imposed programmes are difficult to make work. We will see this in the UK when the job cuts take hold and unemployed people are coerced into Adult Education classes for fear of losing benefits. The policy documents and discussions we are seeing point to this.

In Aunties example, there must have been some motivation from the Learners themselves to enrol.

I think this ties nicely with Neely's point. Unless the learners are motivated, they will not be enrolled or engage wholeheartedly in their studies.

I am a great believer in Maslow's theory of Hierarchy of Needs. When students come to our classes worried about their day-to-day existence, they would not shot great entusiasm in finding out why they should write in paragraphs or why they should read 1984; in their own eyes, their own lives and futures are as bleak, probably.

This does not mean, of course, that we - as teachers - should give up trying until all our students have solved their survival problems; we need to find ways of engaging our learners in ways that make it relevant to their lives.

This is one mountain that will never come to Mohammad so it is Mohammad's responsibility to find a way to reach the mountain.

[LitNetIsGreat]

I’m currently reading Maslow’s book, as well as other things, and yes I think that he makes a deal of sense.

I agree that teachers have to find a way to connect with students and really sell the relevance of learning. This sort of approach seems to be the latest thing anyway, which also ties in closely with the idea of “ketchuping” learning, as in writing a letter to their favourite celebrity or using popular shows such as X Factor to “ketchup” a writing task. I think that there is a balancing act to play here though, I’m not entirely keen on the ketchup approach if I’m honest. The danger I think in this is that you don’t stretch students beyond their horizons. The danger is that you are merely re-enforcing a narrow perspective, you are not escaping the surrounding force as it were, but working within it. I suppose a little bit of it is okay (though you wouldn’t find me setting any X Factor based tasks I’m afraid) but there is a definite danger of overdoing it.

[AuntShecky]

Thanks Paul, Neely, and Scher for your comments.

As to the need for "competent" teachers I can't emphasize strongly enough the point repeatedly brought out in Shorris's article in that the only way for a program such as this to work is to have not only "competent" teachers but a high calibre faculty, exactly equivalent to the professors whom the affluent students would encounter at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Chicago, where the idea of "the best education for the best is the best education for us all" originated with Robert Maynard Hutchins.

The program is not going to work if taught by part-time, inexperienced, disaffected people who happen to have teaching certificates. Even though they were relatively young (18-35), the adult students may have been expecting to have the same old, same old which the various agencies have always --sometimes begrudgingly
given them. Poor people are not only victims of the not enough, they are also subjected to and --perhaps unintentionally -- held down by the "good enough." (Good enough for "them," though certainly not for Columbia freshmen.)

Once the students in the pilot Clemente course realized that they were being offered the very best, they rose to the occasion, to use the cliché. The subject matter itself-- which was never watered down, nor dumbed down-- made a big difference as well.

When it comes to educational practice, much has been made about the backfiring effect of trying to instill "self-esteem," especially that of the a priori variety, and justifiably so. The students had a great deal of street sense and would have seen the phoniness of that kind of condescension a mile away. Yet the curriculum and the distinguished faculty was so carefully constructed that
when Shorris told the first group, "You are the elites," they wanted to prove him right.

Another motivation to succeed in the humanities course is that the civilizing, "politically" (Thucydides) effects were almost immediate, as illustrated by the elegant discussions after the students' logic class, the potentially violent situation averted when the student "reflected" on what he had learned about Socrates. (This might be why anyone under 18 was not admitted to the class. Maybe there was the idea that teenagers had not yet developed the kind of emotional maturity required to fully adapt to the "moral
life of downtown.")

After I posted this thread, I couldn't stop thinking about this program and what it accomplished. The conventional thinking about the humanities is that there is something amorphous, not "practical" skills that can be translated into daily life, perhaps in the way that math and science can. Yet -- as Shorris's findings show, everything about the Clemente Course is not only practical but also beneficial to both the student himself or herself but the community and society (the "city-state) at large. Nothing could be more pragmatic than that! Somehow, somewhere beyond this "moonlit world" William James is smiling. Or at least, I'd like to think so.

[Paulclem]

I agree with a lot of what you say Aunty, especially the competency of teachers and the instilling of false self esteem. It does present a conundrum in the sense of how do you offer such a class to - in our authority - 3,000 Learners? This is without those Adult Learners who are registered on college courses.

Perhaps the aim of the class was to offer to an underclass who qualified for this particular experiment, but then what do you do with the results that tell you that the best teachers we have to offer can make a significant difference?

Competency is difficult to assess in that paper and certificates can't equal experience. Interpersonal skills and connecting with learners, finding their strengths and helping them to see these can be difficult to do. I think this is one way of, not instilling confidence, but of helping the learner to realise their own abilities and nurture the confidence from there.

My own belief is that a class should meet the accreditation needs of the class, help them with their English etc, but should also provide an education in the wider sense. What that may be perhaps depends upon the unique interests of the class. Of course the Tutor is probably not an Arts specialist or a Literature Professor, but can experiment with such Arts topics, and in a perfect world should be encouraged to do so. Economics may well focus us on careers, jobs, courses etc for a while until it is realised that it is not necessarily the best way to deliver to adults once again when the pendulum swings back to a more open curriculum.

[LitNetIsGreat]

Hello again,

As to the need for "competent" teachers I can't emphasize strongly enough the point repeatedly brought out in Shorris's article in that the only way for a program such as this to work is to have not only "competent" teachers but a high calibre faculty, exactly equivalent to the professors whom the affluent students would encounter at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Chicago, where the idea of "the best education for the best is the best education for us all" originated with Robert Maynard Hutchins.

But it is not possible to have the best, of the best, of the best, for all – there’s a huge paradox going on there! The nature of world suggests that the very best teachers, the most qualified are likely to gravitate to the best, and most highly paid or respected institutions because that is the way it is. It would be nice to have Harvard or Oxford teachers at your local run-down comprehensive but that is unlikely to happen. Besides, I think it is unfair to suggest that only those people who teach at the likes of Harvard, Oxford or Cambridge are any good anyway. It does sound like the people in your example were inspirational people, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that just because they are cut out for Harvard/Oxford doesn’t necessarily mean they are naturally cut out for the social rejects.

I suspect that many of us at some time or another have come across a really inspirational teacher, someone who has had a significant impact in our lives. I know that I can think of at least two. These people don’t necessarily have to be Harvard class to be so inspirational. Besides recent studies suggest that students actually learn significantly more from their peers than they do from the teacher directly anyway. What I am suggesting is that it is folly to dismiss “part-time, inexperienced” teachers as no good. There are a large degree of really talented and passionate people who work with disaffected people and they do a fantastic job, they may not be Harvard class, but they work wonders daily and get little recognition for it. Personally, I’m not very good with the disaffected kids and work much better with the motivated ones, but those who can and do deserve the recognition.

It is true perhaps that there are a lot of mediocre teachers, but there are a lot of mediocre people in all walks of life, in fact mediocre is the standard! It is unrealistic to expect every single teacher to be highly inspirational especially when standard teacher pay is chicken feed in comparison with those as educated in other fields, think of the money that could be made in law or business to those with the talent.

Again I’m not surprised to learn that the humanities offers a life enriching experience, I suspect that most people on these forums understand that to some degree, the problem arises when you have to transmit that understanding to the masses, under the direction of national frameworks (which often succeed in tying both hands behind the back) to whole classes of people who aren’t interested, or mature enough to understand, or even give much of a damn.

Yes it would be nice to open up more projects like the one in your example, to bring in top inspirational people who can act with disadvantaged groups but things like this are microscopic to begin with and getting cut and cut as we speak. Society may not be able to afford to get rid of valuable educational protects in the humanities, but I'm afraid "society" has already voted to do so.

[AuntShecky]

As Earl Shorris's essay so eloquently has shown, knowledge of the humanities has observable, practical benefits. Back in 1996 --and sadly, it is still true today-- his educational experiment was brand-new, an anomaly, the direct opposite of what was considered to be appropriate for undereducated poor people.

Most adult education programs, especially those operated by the various levels of government, concentrate mainly on two goals -- 1. Preparing the adult students for a standardized exam the passing of which would earn the participant the equivalent of a high school diploma, the G.E.D.
2. The other focus is on preparing students for the workplace, embedding "job readiness" skills directly into the lesson plans.

Years ago when I was -- I use the term loosely --"gainfully employed" as a part-time instructor in such a program I had begun to suspect that the motivation for this philosophy was not so much enabling the individual get a leg up on upward mobility (i.e. offering an opportunity for empowerment) as much as getting him or her off the dole and thinning the welfare rosters. Of course that is fine, it doesn't ostensibly hurt the student, but it more directly helps the taxpayers and those who puzzle out the government budgets.

The problem is that this "welfare-to-work" idea doesn't really go far enough. There is a certain "stopgap" urgency about it that does little to solve long-term issues of poverty. Since the kind of employment the program prepared them for were traditionally low-paying and dead-end jobs, all but deliberately designed to keep poor people poor. Don't get me wrong --all work can endow a person with dignity, and the specific jobs the students were steered into -- home health care aides, for example- are absolutely necessary. Still, nothing in the "welfare-to-work" program was meant to help the student become better adapted to defending themselves against a society which, if hadn't already "written them off" tacitly kept them oppressed in order to maintain the status quo. Whenever I respectfully broached the questions, "Whatever happened to learning for its own sake?" or, "How can we help some of these students prepare themselves to further their learning, such as enrolling in a community college," the full-time teachers and the administration went out their way to ignore my concerns.

Enlightened programs such as the Clemente Course have a more holistic --and I daresay-- ennobling approach. Giving disadvantaged people the same access to the knowledge of the humanities is --as in the overused expression--"leveling the playing field."

Again, when recruiting the faculty for programs like the Clemente Course, it's essential to follow the Hutchins philosophy of "the best education for the best is the best education for us all." Do you think the movers and shakers of this country would allow an incompetent faculty teaching their precious heirs at Yale? Then why isn't intellectual excellece acceptable for other students simply because they are poor? Obviously, no community-run humanities class can afford to pay the same salaries found on the campuses of Harvard or Columbia. The solution is to do what Earl Shorris did, and that is ask distinguished experts to donate their time and talent. This is only reasonable-- it is public knowledge that on so many Ivy League campuses, humanities professors have been known to espouse causes that promote social equity and improve the public weal. Here is their golden opportunity to put their beliefs --and their money --where their mouths are.

[Paulclem]

Years ago when I was -- I use the term loosely --"gainfully employed" as a part-time instructor in such a program I had begun to suspect that the motivation for this philosophy was not so much enabling the individual get a leg up on upward mobility (i.e. offering an opportunity for empowerment) as much as getting him or her off the dole and thinning the welfare rosters. Of course that is fine, it doesn't ostensibly hurt the student, but it more directly helps the taxpayers and those who puzzle out the government budgets.

I'm not so sure that these are the motivations these days. Given the sheer mass of students in India and China, we've got to keep up technologically. We, in the West, have the institutions and expertise to do this. I think Governments are all too aware of this. When you consider that the brilliant top 2% of India totals more than all the students in ther UK, then it becomes patently apparent that we are bound to fall behind in the future. In the meantime we do have the teachers and infrastructure.