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May. 5th, 2004 06:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pearwaldorfArticles on the Clemente Course in the Humanities, a curriculum designed to teach classical liberal arts to the economically disadvantaged, including Plato and Shakespeare.
I had an incredible English teacher in my junior year of high school. She scared the shit out of me and she taught me more about history and literature in a year than I learned in three other years of English and history classes. She used to tell us about how there were no honors or remedial tracks at the school, that the kids on the edge took the same classes as the kids who were doing well, and that the kids who we would put into remedial English today and make read Dick and Jane (or whatever they make remedial kids read these days) would sometimes make more cogent connections from the text to their lives. It's what Earl Shorris, the founder of the Clemente Course, calls "living close to the bone," which permits them to understand the works in different, sometimes better, ways than somebody who might not have had to learn through the school of hard knocks.
This program really should be made nationwide, and taught in every school in the country. But that's never going to happen, because scary shit happens when poor people are taught how to think like rich ones.
I had an incredible English teacher in my junior year of high school. She scared the shit out of me and she taught me more about history and literature in a year than I learned in three other years of English and history classes. She used to tell us about how there were no honors or remedial tracks at the school, that the kids on the edge took the same classes as the kids who were doing well, and that the kids who we would put into remedial English today and make read Dick and Jane (or whatever they make remedial kids read these days) would sometimes make more cogent connections from the text to their lives. It's what Earl Shorris, the founder of the Clemente Course, calls "living close to the bone," which permits them to understand the works in different, sometimes better, ways than somebody who might not have had to learn through the school of hard knocks.
This program really should be made nationwide, and taught in every school in the country. But that's never going to happen, because scary shit happens when poor people are taught how to think like rich ones.
