\documentclass[12pt,draft]{article}
\usepackage{fullpage}
\date{Harper's, September 1997}

\title{On the Uses of a Liberal Education\\
II. As a weapon in the hands of the restless poor}

\author{Earl Shorris}

\begin{document}
\maketitle

Next month I will publish a book about poverty in America, but not
the book I intended. The world took me by surprise---not once, but
again and again. The poor themselves led me in directions I could not
have imagined, especially the one that came out of a conversation in
a maximum-security prison for women that is set, incongruously, in a
lush Westchester suburb fifty miles north of New York City.

I had been working on the book for about three years when I went to
the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for the first time. The staff
and inmates had developed a program to deal with family violence, and
I wanted to see how their ideas fit with what I had learned about
poverty.

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.

By the time I got to Bedford Hills, I had listened to more than six
hundred people, some of them over the course of two or three years.
Although my method is that of the bricoleur, the tinkerer who
assembles a thesis of the bric-a-brac he finds in the world, I did
not think there would be any more surprises. But I had not counted on
what Viniece Walker was to say.

It is considered bad form in prison to speak of a person's crime, and
I will follow that precise etiquette here. I can tell you that
Viniece Walker came to Bedford Hills when she was twenty years old, a
high school dropout who read at the level of a college sophomore, a
graduate of crackhouses, the streets of Harlem, and a long alliance
with a brutal man. On the surface Viniece has remained as tough as
she was on the street. She speaks bluntly, and even though she is HIV
positive and the virus has progressed during her time in prison, she
still swaggers as she walks down the long prison corridors. While in
prison, Niecie, as she is known to her friends, completed her high
school requirements and began to pursue a college degree (psychology
is the only major offered at Bedford Hills, but Niecie also took a
special interest in philosophy). She became a counselor to women with
a history of family violence and a comforter to those with AIDS.

Only the deaths of other women cause her to stumble in the midst of
her swaggering step, to spend days alone with the remorse that drives
her to seek redemption. She goes through life as if she had been
imagined by Dostoevsky, but even more complex than his fictions,
alive, a person, a fair-skinned and freckled African-American woman,
and in prison. It was she who responded to my sudden question, ``Why
do you think people are poor?''

We had never met before. The conversation around us focused on the
abuse of women. Niecie's eyes were perfectly opaque---hostile,
prison eyes. Her mouth was set in the beginning of a sneer.

``You got to begin with the children,'' she said, speaking rapidly,
clipping out the street sounds as they came into her speech.

She paused long enough to let the change of direction take effect,
then resumed the rapid, rhythmless speech. ``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.''

I smiled at her, misunderstanding, thinking I was indulging her. ``And
then they won't be poor anymore?''

She read every nuance of my response, and answered angrily, ``And they
won't be poor no more.''

``What you mean is---''

``What I mean is what I said---a moral alternative to the street.''

She didn't speak of jobs or money. In that, she was like the others I
had listened to. No one had spoken of jobs or money. But how could
the ``moral life of downtown'' lead anyone out from the surround of
force? How could a museum push poverty away? Who can dress in statues
or eat the past? And what of the political life? Had Niecie skipped a
step or failed to take a step? The way out of poverty was politics,
not the ``moral life of downtown.'' But to enter the public world, to
practice the political life, the poor had first to learn to reflect.
That was what Niecie meant by the ``moral life of downtown.'' She did
not make the error of divorcing ethics from politics. Niecie had
simply said, in a kind of shorthand, that no one could step out of
the panicking circumstance of poverty directly into the public world.

Although she did not say so, I was sure that when she spoke of the
``moral life of downtown'' she meant something that had happened to
her. With no job and no money, a prisoner, she had undergone a
radical transformation. She had followed the same path that led to
the invention of politics in ancient Greece. She had learned to
reflect. In further conversation it became clear that when she spoke
of ``the moral life of downtown'' she meant the 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. The poor did not need
anyone to release them; an escape route existed. But to open this
avenue to reflection and politics a major distinction between the
preparation for the life of the rich and the life of the poor had to
be eliminated.

Once Niecie had challenged me with her theory, the comforts of
tinkering came to an end; I could no longer make an homage to the
happenstance world and rest. To test Niecie's theory, students,
faculty, and facilities were required. Quantitative measures would
have to be developed; anecdotal information would also be useful. And
the ethics of the experiment had to be considered: I resolved to do
no harm. There was no need for the course to have a ``sink or swim''
character; it could aim to keep as many afloat as possible.

When the idea for an experimental course became clear in my mind, I
discussed it with Dr. Jaime Inclan, director of the Roberto Clemente
Family Guidance Center in lower Manhattan, a facility that provides
counseling to poor people, mainly Latinos, in their own language and
in their own community. Dr. Inclan offered the center's conference
room for a classroom. We would put three metal tables end to end to
approximate the boat-shaped tables used in discussion sections at the
University of Chicago of the Hutchins era,\footnote{Under the guidance
of Robert Maynard Hutchins (1929-1951), the University of Chicago
required year-long courses in the humanities, social sciences, and
natural sciences for the Bachelor of Arts degree. Hutchins developed
the curriculum with the help of Mortimer Adler, among others; the
Hutchins courses later influenced Adler's Great Books program.}  which
I used as a model for the course. A card table in the back of the room
would hold a coffeemaker and a few cookies. The setting was not
elegant, but it would do. And the front wall was covered by a
floor-to-ceiling blackboard.

Now the course lacked only students and teachers. With no funds and a
budget that grew every time a new idea for the course crossed my
mind, I would have to ask the faculty to donate its time and effort.
Moreover, when Hutchins said, ``The best education for the best is the
best education for us all,'' he meant it: he insisted that full
professors teach discussion sections in the college. If the Clemente
Course in the Humanities was to follow the same pattern, it would
require a faculty with the knowledge and prestige that students might
encounter in their first year at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Chicago.

I turned first to the novelist Charles Simmons. He had been assistant
editor of The New York Times Book Review and had taught at Columbia
University. He volunteered to teach poetry, beginning with simple
poems, Housman, and ending with Latin poetry. Grace Glueck, who
writes art news and criticism for the New York Times, planned a
course that began with cave paintings and ended in the late twentieth
century. Timothy Koranda, who did his graduate work at MIT, had
published journal articles on mathematical logic, but he had been
away from his field for some years and looked forward to getting back
to it. I planned to teach the American history course through
documents, beginning with the Magna Carta, moving on to the second of
Locke's \emph{Two Treatises of Government}, the Declaration of Independence,
and so on through the documents of the Civil War. I would also teach
the political philosophy class.

Since I was a \emph{na\"\i f} in this endeavor, it did not immediately
occur to me that recruiting students would present a problem. I didn't
know how many I needed. All I had were criteria for selection:

Age: 18-35.

Household income: Less than 150 percent of the Census Bureau's
Official Poverty Threshold (though this was to change slightly).

Educational level: Ability to read a tabloid newspaper.

Educational goals: An expression of intent to complete the course.

Dr. Inclan arranged a meeting of community activists who could help
recruit students. Lynette Lauretig of The Door, a program that
provides medical and educational services to adolescents, and Angel
Roman of the Grand Street Settlement, which offers work and training
and GED programs, were both willing to give us access to prospective
students. They also pointed out some practical considerations. The
course had to provide bus and subway tokens, use fares ranged between
three and six dollars per class per student, and the students could
not afford sixty or even thirty dollars a month for transportation.
We also had to offer dinner or a snack, because the classes were to
be held from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m.

The first recruiting session came only a few days later. Nancy
Mamis-King, associate executive director of the Neighborhood Youth \&
Family Services program in the South Bronx, had identified some
Clemente Course candidates and had assembled about twenty of her
clients and their supervisors in a circle of chairs in a conference
room. Everyone in the room was black or Latino, with the exception of
one social worker and me.

After I explained the idea of the course, the white social worker was
the first to ask a question: ``Are you going to teach African history?''

``No. We'll be teaching a section on American history, based on
documents, as I said. We want to teach the ideas of history so that---''

``You have to teach African history.''

``This is America, so we'll teach American history. If we were in
Africa, I would teach African history, and if we were in China, I
would teach Chinese history.''

``You're indoctrinating people in Western culture.''

I tried to get beyond her. ``We'll study African art,'' I said, ``as it
affects art in America. We'll study American history and literature;
you can't do that without studying African-American culture, because
culturally all Americans are black as well as white, Native American,
Asian, and so on.'' It was no use; not one of them applied for
admission to the course.

A few days later Lynette Lauretig arranged a meeting with some of her
staff at The Door. We disagreed about the course. They thought it
should be taught at a much lower level. Although I could not change
their views, they agreed to assemble a group of Door members who
might be interested in the humanities.

On an early evening that same week, about twenty prospective students
were scheduled to meet in a classroom at The Door. Most of them came
late. Those who arrived first slumped in their chairs, staring at the
floor or greeting me with sullen glances. A few ate candy or what
appeared to be the remnants of a meal. The students were mostly black
and Latino, one was Asian, and five were white; two of the whites
were immigrants who had severe problems with English. When I
introduced myself, several of the students would not shake my hand,
two or three refused even to look at me, one girl giggled, and the
last person to volunteer his name, a young man dressed in a Tommy
Hilfiger sweatshirt and wearing a cap turned sideways, drawled,
``Henry Jones, but they call me Sleepy, because I got these sleepy
eyes---''

``In our class, we'll call you Mr. Jones.''

He smiled and slid down in his chair so that his back was parallel to
the floor.

Before I finished attempting to shake hands with the prospective
students, a waiflike Asian girl with her mouth half-full of cake
said, ``Can we get on with it? I'm bored.''

I liked the group immediately.

Having failed in the South Bronx, I resolved to approach these
prospective students differently. ``You've been cheated,'' I said.
``Rich people learn the humanities; you didn't. The humanities are a
foundation for getting along in the world, for thinking, for learning
to reflect on the world instead of just reacting to whatever force is
turned against you. I think the humanities are one of the ways to
become political, and I don't mean political in the sense of voting
in an election but in the broad sense.'' I told them Thucydides'
definition of politics.

``Rich people know politics in that sense. They know how to negotiate
instead of using force. They know how to use politics to get along,
to get power. It doesn't mean that rich people are good and poor
people are bad. It simply means that rich people know a more
effective method for living in this society.

``Do all rich people, or people who are in the middle, know the
humanities? Not a chance. But some do. And it helps. It helps to live
better and enjoy life more. Will the humanities make you rich? Yes.
Absolutely. But not in terms of money. In terms of life.

``Rich people learn the humanities in private schools and expensive
universities. And that's one of the ways in which they learn the
political life. I think that is the real difference between the haves
and have-nots in this country. If you want real power, legitimate
power, the kind that comes from the people and belongs to the people,
you must understand politics. The humanities will help.

``Here's how it works: We'll pay your subway fare; take care of your
children, if you have them; give you a snack or a sandwich; provide
you with books and any other materials you need. But we'll make you
think harder, use your mind more fully, than you ever have before.
You'll have to read and think about the same kinds of ideas you would
encounter in a first-year course at Harvard or Yale or Oxford.

``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.
There will be tests to take, papers to write. And I can't promise you
anything but a certificate of completion at the end of the course.
I'll be talking to colleges about giving credit for the course, but I
can't promise anything. If you come to the Clemente Course, you must
do it because you want to study the humanities, because you want a
certain kind of life, a richness of mind and spirit. That's all I
offer you: philosophy, poetry, art history, logic, rhetoric, and
American history.

``Your teachers will all be people of accomplishment in their fields,''
I said, and I spoke a little about each teacher. That's the course.
October through May, with a two-week break at Christmas. It is
generally accepted in America that the liberal arts and the
humanities in particular belong to the elites. I think you're the
elites.''

The young Asian woman said, ``What are you getting out of this?''

``This is a demonstration project. I'm writing a book. This will be
proof, I hope, of my idea about the humanities. Whether it succeeds
or fails will be up to the teachers and you.''

All but one of the prospective students applied for admission to the
course.

I repeated the new presentation at the Grand Street Settlement and at
other places around the city. There were about fifty candidates for
the thirty positions in the course. Personal interviews began in
early September.

Meanwhile, almost all of my attempts to raise money had failed. Only
the novelist Starling Lawrence, who is also editor in chief of W. W.
Norton, which had contracted to publish the book; the publishing
house itself; and a small, private family foundation supported the
experiment. We were far short of our budgeted expenses, but my wife,
Sylvia, and I agreed that the cost was still very low, and we decided
to go ahead.

Of the fifty prospective students who showed up at the Clemente
Center for personal interviews, a few were too rich (a postal
supervisor's son, a fellow who claimed his father owned a factory in
Nigeria that employed sixty people) and more than a few could not
read. Two home-care workers from Local 1199 could not arrange their
hours to enable them to take the course. Some of the applicants were
too young: a thirteen-year-old and two who had just turned sixteen.

Lucia Medina, a woman with five children who told me that she often
answered the door at the single-room occupancy hotel where she lived
with a butcher knife in her hand, was the oldest person accepted into
the course. Carmen Quinones, a recovering addict who had spent time
in prison, was the next eldest. Both were in their early thirties.
The interviews went on for days.

Abel Lomas\footnote{Not his real name.} shared an apartment and worked
part-time wrapping
packages at Macy's. His father had abandoned the family when Abel was
born. His mother was murdered by his stepfather when Abel was
thirteen. With no one to turn to and no place to stay, he lived on
the streets, first in Florida, then back in New York City. He used
the tiny stipend from his mother's Social Security to keep himself
alive.

After the recruiting session at The Door, I drove up Sixth Avenue
from Canal Street with Abel, and we talked about ethics. He had a
street tough's delivery, spitting out his ideas in crudely formed
sentences of four, five, eight words, strings of blunt declarations,
with never a dependent clause to qualify his thoughts. He did not
clear his throat with badinage, as timidity teaches us to do, nor did
he waste his breath with tact.

``What do you think about drugs?'' he asked, the strangely breathless
delivery further coarsened by his Dominican accent. ``My cousin is a
dealer.''

``I've seen a lot of people hurt by drugs.''

``Your family has nothing to eat. You sell drugs. What's worse? Let
your family starve or sell drugs?''

``Starvation and drug addiction are both bad, aren't they?''



``Yes,'' he said, not ``yeah'' or ``uh-huh'' but a precise, almost formal ``yes.''

``So it's a question of the worse of two evils? How shall we decide?''

The question came up near Thirty-fourth Street, where Sixth Avenue
remains hellishly traffic-jammed well into the night. Horns honked,
people flooded into the street against the light. Buses and trucks
and taxicabs threatened their way from one lane to the next where the
overcrowded avenue crosses the equally crowded Broadway. As we passed
Herald Square and made our way north again, I said, ``There are a
couple of ways to look at it. One comes from Immanuel Kant, who said
that you should not do anything unless you want it to become a
universal law; that is, unless you think it's what everybody should
do. So Kant wouldn't agree to selling drugs or letting your family
starve.''

Again he answered with a formal ``Yes.''

``There's another way to look at it, which is to ask what is the
greatest good for the greatest number: in this case, keeping your
family from starvation or keeping tens, perhaps hundreds of people
from losing their lives to drugs. So which is the greatest good for
the greatest number?''

``That's what I think,'' he said.

``What?''

``You shouldn't sell drugs. You can always get food to eat. Welfare.
Something.''

``You're a Kantian.''

``Yes.''

``You know who Kant is?''

``I think so.''

We had arrived at Seventy-seventh Street, where he got out of the car
to catch the subway before I turned east. As he opened the car door
and the light came on, the almost military neatness of him struck me.
He had the newly cropped hair of a cadet. His clothes were clean,
without a wrinkle. He was an orphan, a street kid, an immaculate
urchin. Within a few weeks he would be nineteen years old, the Social
Security payments would end, and he would have to move into a shelter.

Some of those who came for interviews were too poor. I did not think
that was possible when we began, and I would like not to believe it
now, but it was true. There is a point at which the level of forces
that surround the poor can become insurmountable, when there is no
time or energy left to be anything but poor. Most often I could not
recruit such people for the course; when I did, they soon dropped out.

Over the days of interviewing, a class slowly assembled. I could not
then imagine who would last the year and who would not. One young
woman submitted a neatly typed essay that said, ``I was homeless once,
then I lived for some time in a shelter. Right now, I have got my own
space granted by the Partnership for the Homeless. Right now, I am
living alone, with very limited means. Financially I am overwhelmed
by debts. I cannot afford all the food I need\dots.''

A brother and sister, refugees from Tashkent, lived with their
parents in the farthest reaches of Queens, far beyond the end of the
subway line. They had no money, and they had been refused admission
by every school to which they had applied. I had not intended to
accept immigrants or people who had difficulty with the English
language, but I took them into the class.

I also took four who had been in prison, three who were homeless,
three who were pregnant, one who lived in a drugged dream-state in
which she was abused, and one whom I had known for a long time and
who was dying of AIDS. As I listened to them, I wondered 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?

Between the end of recruiting and the orientation session that would
open the course, I made a visit to Bedford Hills to talk with Niecie
Walker. It was hot, and the drive up from the city had been
unpleasant. I didn't yet know Niecie very well. She didn't trust me,
and I didn't know what to make of her. While we talked, she held a
huge white pill in her hand. ``For AIDS,'' she said.

``Are you sick?''

``My T-cell count is down. But that's neither here nor there. Tell me
about the course, Earl. What are you going to teach?''

``Moral philosophy.''

``And what does that include?''

She had turned the visit into an interrogation. I didn't mind. At the
end of the conversation I would be going out into ``the free world'';
if she wanted our meeting to be an interrogation, I was not about to
argue. I said, ``We'll begin with Plato: the \emph{Apology}, a little
of the \emph{Crito}, a few pages of the \emph{Phaedo} so that they'll
know what happened to Socrates. Then we'll read Aristotle's
\emph{Nicomachean Ethics}. I also want them to read Thucydides,
particularly Pericles' Funeral Oration in order to make the connection
between ethics and politics, to lead them in the direction I hope the
course will take them. Then we'll end with \emph{Antigone}, but read
as moral and political philosophy as well as drama.''

``There's something missing,'' she said, leaning back in her chair,
taking on an air of superiority.

The drive had been long, the day was hot, the air in the room was
dead and damp. ``Oh, yeah,'' I said, ``and what's that?''

``Plato's Allegory of the Cave. How can you teach philosophy to poor
people without the Allegory of the Cave? The ghetto is the cave.
Education is the light. Poor people can understand that.''

At the beginning of the orientation at the Clemente Center a week
later, each teacher spoke for a minute or two. Dr. Inclan and his
research assistant, Patricia Vargas, administered the questionnaire
he had devised to measure, as best he could, the role of force and
the amount of reflection in the lives of the students. I explained
that each class was going to be videotaped as another way of
documenting the project. Then I gave out the first assignment: ``In
preparation for our next meeting, I would like you to read a brief
selection from Plato's \emph{Republic}: the Allegory of the Cave.''

I tried to guess how many students would return for the first class.
I hoped for twenty, expected fifteen, and feared ten. Sylvia, who had
agreed to share the administrative tasks of the course, and I
prepared coffee and cookies for twenty-five. We had a plastic
container filled with subway tokens. Thanks to Starling Lawrence, we
had thirty copies of Bernard Knox's \emph{Norton Book of Classical
Literature}, which contained all of the texts for the philosophy
section except the \emph{Republic} and the \emph{Nicomachean Ethics}.

At six o'clock there were only ten students seated around the long
table, but by six-fifteen the number had doubled, and a few minutes
later two more straggled in out of the dusk. I had written a time
line on the blackboard, showing them the temporal progress of
thinking---from the role of myth in Neolithic societies to The
Gilgamesh Epic and forward to the Old Testament, Confucius, the
Greeks, the New Testament, the Koran, the Epic of Son-Jara, and
ending with Nahuatl and Maya poems, which took us up to the contact
between Europe and America, where the history course began. The time
line served as context and geography as well as history: no race, no
major culture was ignored. ``Let's agree,'' I told them, ``that we are
all human, whatever our origins. And now let's go into Plato's cave.''

I told them that there would be no lectures in the philosophy section
of the course; we would use the Socratic method, which is called
maieutic dialogue. ``{}`Maieutic' comes from the Greek word for
midwifery. I'll take the role of midwife in our dialogue. Now, what
do I mean by that? What does a midwife do?''

It was the beginning of a love affair, the first moment of their
infatuation with Socrates. Later, Abel Lomas would characterize that
moment in his no-nonsense fashion, saying that it was the first time
anyone had ever paid attention to their opinions.

Grace Glueck began the art history class in a darkened room lit with
slides of the Lascaux caves and next turned the students' attention
to Egypt, arranging for them to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art
to see the Temple of Dendur and the Egyptian Galleries. They arrived
at the museum on a Friday evening. Darlene Codd brought her
two-year-old son. Pearl Lau was late, as usual. One of the students,
who had told me how much he was looking forward to the museum visit,
didn't show up, which surprised me. Later I learned that he had been
arrested for jumping a turnstile in a subway station on his way to
the museum and was being held in a prison cell under the Brooklyn
criminal courthouse. In the Temple of Dendur, Samantha Smoot asked
questions of Felicia Blum, a museum lecturer. Samantha was the
student who had burst out with the news, in one of the first sessions
of the course, that people in her neighborhood believed it ``wasn't no
use goin' to school because the white man wouldn't let you up no
matter what.'' But in a hall where the statuary was of half-human,
half-animal female figures, it was Samantha who asked what the glyphs
meant, encouraging Felicia Blum to read them aloud, to translate them
into English. Toward the end of the evening, Grace led the students
out of the halls of antiquities into the Rockefeller Wing, where she
told them of the connections of culture and art in Mali, Benin, and
the Pacific Islands. When the students had collected their coats and
stood together near the entrance to the museum, preparing to leave,
Samantha stood apart, a tall, slim young woman, dressed in a
deerstalker cap and a dark blue peacoat. She made an exaggerated
farewell wave at us and returned to Egypt---her ancient mirror.

Charles Simmons began the poetry class with poems as puzzles and
laughs. His plan was to surprise the class, and he did. At first he
read the poems aloud to them, interrupting himself with footnotes to
bring them along. He showed them poems of love and of seduction, and
satiric commentaries on those poems by later poets. ``Let us read,''
the students demanded, but Charles refused. He tantalized them with
the opportunity to read poems aloud. A tug-of-war began between him
and the students, and the standoff was ended not by Charles directly
but by Hector Anderson. When Charles asked if anyone in the class
wrote poetry, Hector raised his hand.

``Can you recite one of your poems for us?'' Charles said.

Until that moment, Hector had never volunteered a comment, though he
had spoken well and intelligently when asked. He preferred to slouch
in his chair, dressed in full camouflage gear, wearing a nylon
stocking over his hair and eating slices of fresh cantaloupe or
honeydew melon.

In response to Charles's question, Hector slid up to a sitting
position. ``If you turn that camera off,'' he said. ``I don't want
anybody using my lyrics.'' When he was sure the red light of the video
camera was off, Hector stood and recited verse after verse of a poem
that belonged somewhere in the triangle formed by Ginsberg's
\emph{Howl}, the Book of Lamentations, and hip-hop. When Charles and
the students finished applauding, they asked Hector to say the poem
again, and he did. Later Charles told me, ``That kid is the real
thing.'' Hector's discomfort with Sylvia and me turned to ease. He
came to our house for a small Christmas party and at other times. We
talked on the telephone about a scholarship program and about what
steps he should take next in his education. I came to know his
parents. As a student, he began quietly, almost secretly, to surpass
many of his classmates.

Timothy Koranda was the most professorial of the professors. He
arrived precisely on time, wearing a hat of many styles---part
fedora, part Borsalino, part Stetson, and at least one-half World War
I campaign hat. He taught logic during class hours, filling the
blackboard from floor to ceiling, wall to wall, drawing the
intersections of sets here and truth tables there and a great square
of oppositions in the middle of it all. After class, he walked with
students to the subway, chatting about Zen or logic or Heisenberg.

On one of the coldest nights of the winter, he introduced the
students to logic problems stated in ordinary language that they
could solve by reducing the phrases to symbols. He passed out copies
of a problem, two pages long, then wrote out some of the key phrases
on the blackboard. ``Take this home with you,'' he said, ``and at our
next meeting we shall see who has solved it. I shall also attempt to
find the answer.''

By the time he finished writing out the key phrases, however, David
Iskhakov raised his hand. Although they listened attentively, neither
David nor his sister Susana spoke often in class. She was shy, and he
was embarrassed at his inability to speak perfect English.

``May I go to blackboard?'' David said. ``And will see if I have found
correct answer to zis problem.''

Together Tim and David erased the black-board, then David began
covering it with signs and symbols. ``If first man is earning this
money, and second man is closer to this town\dots,'' he said, carefully
laying out the conditions. After five minutes or so, he said, ``And
the answer is: B will get first to Cleveland!''

Samantha Smoot shouted, ``That's not the answer. The mistake you made
is in the first part there, where it says who earns more money.''

Tim folded his arms across his chest, happy. ``I shall let you all
take the problem home,'' he said.

When Sylvia and I left the Clemente Center that night, a knot of
students was gathered outside, huddled against the wind. Snow had
begun to fall, a slippery powder on the gray ice that covered all but
a narrow space down the center of the sidewalk. Samantha and David
stood in the middle of the group, still arguing over the answer to
the problem. I leaned in for a moment to catch the character of the
argument. It was even more polite than it had been in the classroom,
because now they govern themselves.

One Saturday morning in January, David Howell telephoned me at home.
``Mr. Shores,'' he said, Anglicizing my name, as many of the students
did.

``Mr. Howell,'' I responded, recognizing his voice.

``How you doin', Mr. Shores?''

``I'm fine. How are you?''

``I had a little problem at work.''

Uh-oh, I thought, bad news was coming. David is a big man, generally
good-humored but with a quick temper. According to his mother, he had
a history of violent behavior. In the classroom he had been one of
the best students, a steady man, twenty-four years old, who always
did the reading assignments and who often made interesting
connections between the humanities and daily life. ``What happened?''

Mr. Shores, there's a woman at my job, she said some things to me and
I said some things to her. And she told my supervisor I had said
things to her, and he called me in about it. She's forty years old
and she don't have no social life, and I have a good social life, and
she's jealous of me.''

``And then what happened?'' The tone of his voice and the timing of the
call did not portend good news.

``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.

One evening, in the American history section, I was telling the
students about Gordon Wood's ideas in \emph{The Radicalism of the
American Revolution}. We were talking about the revolt by some
intellectuals against classical learning at the turn of the eighteenth
century, including Benjamin Franklin's late-life change of heart, when
Henry Jones raised his hand.

``If the Founders loved the humanities so much, how come they treated
the natives so badly?''

I didn't know how to answer this question. There were confounding
explanations to offer about changing attitudes toward Native
Americans, vaguely useful references to views of Rousseau and James
Fenimore Cooper. For a moment I wondered if I should tell them about
Heidegger's Nazi past. Then I saw Abel Lomas's raised hand at the far
end of the table. ``Mr. Lomas,'' I said.

Abel said, ``That's what Aristotle means by incontinence, when you
know what's morally right but you don't do it, because you're
overcome by your passions.''

The other students nodded. They were all inheritors of wounds caused
by the incontinence of educated men; now they had an ally in
Aristotle, who had given them a way to analyze the actions of their
antagonists.

Those who appreciate ancient history understand the radical character
of the humanities. They know that politics did not begin in a perfect
world but in a society even more flawed than ours: one that embraced
slavery, denied the rights of women, practiced a form of
homosexuality that verged on pedophilia, and endured the intrigues
and corruption of its leaders. The genius of that society originated
in man's re-creation of himself through the recognition of his
humanness as expressed in art, literature, rhetoric, philosophy, and
the unique notion of freedom. At that moment, the isolation of the
private life ended and politics began.

The winners in the game of modem society, and even those whose
fortune falls in the middle, 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. As Allan
Bloom, author of the nationally best-selling tract in defense of
elitism, The Closing of the American Mind, put it, they direct the
study of the humanities exclusively at those young people who ``have
been raised in comfort and with the expectation of ever increasing
comfort.''

In the last meeting before graduation, the Clemente students answered
the same set of questions they'd answered at orientation. Between
October and May, students had fallen to AIDS, pregnancy, job
opportunities, pernicious anemia, clinical depression, a
schizophrenic child, and other forces, but of the thirty students
admitted to the course, sixteen had completed it, and fourteen had
earned credit from Bard College. 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. But coming into possession of the faculty of reflection and
the skills of politics leads to a choice for the poor---and whatever
they choose, they will be dangerous: they may use politics to get
along in a society based on the game, to escape from the surround of
force into a gentler life, to behave as citizens, and nothing more;
or they may choose to oppose the game itself. No one can predict the
effect of politics, although we all would like to think that wisdom
goes our way. That is why the poor are so often mobilized and so
rarely politicized. The possibility that they will adopt a moral view
other than that of their mentors can never be discounted. And who
wants to run that risk?

On the night of the first Clemente Course graduation, the students and
their families filled the eighty-five chairs we crammed into the
conference room where classes had been held. Robert Martin, associate
dean of Bard College, read the graduates' names. David Dinkins, the
former mayor of New York City, handed out the diplomas. There were
speeches and presentations. The students gave me a plaque on which
they had misspelled my name. I offered a few words about each student,
congratulated them, and said finally, ``This is what I wish for you:
May you never be more active than when you are doing nothing\dots.'' I
saw their smiles of recognition at the words of Cato, which I had
written on the blackboard early in the course. They could recall again
too the moment when we had come to the denouement of Aristotle's
brilliantly constructed thriller, the \emph{Nicomachean Ethics}---the
idea that in the contemplative life man was most like God. One or two,
perhaps more of the students, closed their eyes. In the momentary
stillness of the room it was possible to think.

The Clemente Course in the Humanities ended a second year in June
1997. Twenty-eight new students had enrolled; fourteen graduated.
Another version of the course will begin this fall in Yucatan,
Mexico, using classical Maya literature in Maya.

On May 14, 1997, Viniece Walker came up for parole for the second
time. She had served more than ten years of her sentence, and she had
been the best of prisoners. In a version of the Clemente Course held
at the prison, she had been my teaching assistant. After a brief
hearing, her request for parole was denied. She will serve two more
years before the parole board will reconsider her case.

A year after graduation, ten of the first sixteen Clemente Course
graduates were attending four-year colleges or going to nursing
school; four of them had received full scholarships to Bard College.
The other graduates were attending community college or working
full-time. Except for one: she had been fired from her job in a
fast-food restaurant for trying to start a union.


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