The Poor Need and Deserve the Humanities Too

From The New York Times, by Abby Goodnough:

For much of last year, Ms. Rivera, now 21, also studied philosophy, art, literature and history, just as students do at Smith, Amherst and the cluster of other elite colleges in this region of western Massachusetts. She was one of several young mothers enrolled in the Clemente Course in the Humanities, a program for the poor offered by the Care Center and about 15 other organizations across the country. The course aims to provide what Earl Shorris, who started it at the Roberto Clemente Family Guidance Center in New York City in 1995, called “an avenue to reflection.” Such avenues are hard to come by in Holyoke, which has among the highest dropout and teenage pregnancy rates in the state.

Mr. Shorris, who died in May, rejected the notion that the poor should focus on learning practical skills to prepare for mostly low-paying jobs. He believed that studying the humanities would teach them how to reflect on the world, putting them on more equal footing with the privileged class....

“There’s a way in which the course asks people to examine their life and what they are seeing around them more deeply,” said Anne Teschner, the Care Center’s executive director. “Living in poverty can be very constricting, so to bring those more expansive ideas into the world of people struggling economically is really empowering.”