Promoting the humantities, or: how to make the poor dangerous

摘要

This fall, about 600 students will enter the Clemente Course in the humanities, an unconventional educational movement be-gun a few years ago in a nontraditional setting in New York. All will be poor, many will not have completed high school some will be homeless, others will have spent time in prison, and there will be many singly parents among them. Most will speak English, although the course will also be taught in Maya, Yupik (an Inuit language), Kiowa, and Spanish. The students will consider the courage of Socrates, examine the philosophical antecedents of the Declaration of Independence, delve into the well-said woes of Antigone, marvel at the art of the Renaissance, and write and write and write until the discipline of the page and the excitement of the humanities merge in a new view of the role of a person in the world. They will, if the rigor of the dance with the humanities succeeds, become political persons, as Pericles defined the idea of the citizen at home, in the community, and the state.