By Jean Cheney

  Lisa DeHerrera arrives for class a few minutes late, a little breathless, her black spiked hair askew. Lisa has just come from her job at a medical supply warehouse running a forklift, the third job she's had since spending five years in a state prison for pushing drugs. She is thirty-five, earned her GED while being locked up, and until eight months ago had little hope for higher education. Earning $9 per hour, she didn't have money for college nor did she believe she could ever get in. But she's not thinking about that now. She's about to discuss Plato's Allegory of the Cave, and she wants to be ready.

  Westminster College philosophy professor Bridget Newell poses the question, "What do you think Plato means when he says that we are like the shackled prisoners in the cave who are seeing shadows and thinking this is reality?"

  Sixteen students around the table begin to weigh in. Ranging in age from twenty to sixty-two, all are employed in low-wage jobs, some working as single parents. A few work at a Head Start Center, one at a cheese factory, another at a rental car business. Some had dreams of college in the past, but those hopes got derailed by an unplanned pregnancy, an illness, a lost job.

  "They can't see anything but what is in front of them, like a lot of people," says Charlene Taul, a fiftyish woman with cropped gray hair. "Plato says they can't turn their heads."

  "This is like my family watching T.V." Lisa chimes in. "I can't even talk to them when they're doing that, and they won't turn it off when I ask them. That's all they're interested in, that's all they know, watching that screen."

  "I was in that cave," says Barbra Moeller. After leaving a fundamentalist religious community with her three children several years ago, Barbra and her family were homeless for a while, and now subsist on a $577 disability check and the income her oldest son brings in from his job at Wendy's. "I think the fire that is throwing those shadows on the wall is like a false sun," she continues. "That fire is like the power of patriarchy, casting shadows that aren't real but everyone is supposed to believe are real. It's a false truth, not the real sun outside the cave that brings warmth and life."

  The group grows quiet.

  What is happening here? People living on the edge of poverty are talking about Plato and patriarchy?

  For the last eight months, these students have been enrolled in The Venture Course in the Humanities, a free, interdisciplinary, college-level course run by the Utah Humanities Council. Their tuition, books, child care, and transportation have been provided through a grant from the Arts, Humanities, and Environment. Cultural Initiative and The Humanities Connection, two private foundations. Since September, they have studied literature and art history, critical writing, American history, and philosophy with professors from Westminster College and the University of Utah. They have written papers, read books, visited museums, completed research. Westminster offers eight units of college credit for students who pass all course requirements.

  Utah's Venture Course in the Humanities is one of the latest programs in the country modeled on the Clemente Course in New York City, the brain-child of author and social activist Earl Shorris in 1995. A long-time student of why people are poor and stay poor, Shorris developed Clemente after talking with an inmate in a maximum- security prison, Viniece Walker. "Why do you think people are poor?" Shorris asked Walker.

  Walker answered: "You've got to teach the moral life of downtown to the children," she said. "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."

  "Oh," said Shorris. "You mean the humanities?"

  "Yes, Earl," Walker replied. "I mean the humanities."

  Walker's advice reinforced Shorris's own growing conviction that what poor people lack most is not job training or skills education but the ability—and time—to reflect, to develop independent thought. They need an opportunity to develop critical thinking and to understand the culture of which they are a part. To address these needs, Shorris created a humanities curriculum for a college-level course for low-income people. Requirements for admission were basic: an income low enough to make attending even a public college difficult and the ability to read a newspaper in English. Curriculum focused on core humanities subjects: literature and critical writing, American history, moral philosophy, and art history. College credit would come from Bard College, faculty from New York University. The class would convene at night and provide child care and bus tokens to the center where the class was being taught.

  From this modest beginning over a decade ago, nine states, including Utah, are now running courses modeled on Clemente. Some use the name and exact curriculum Shorris developed. Others, like Utah's Venture, affiliate with local institutions, and modify the curriculum according to the desires of the faculty involved. Like Venture, most are funded and run by state humanities councils.

  Three weeks after graduating from Venture, Lisa DeHerrera talks about the impact of the course: "People who don't have an opportunity at any sort of higher education really don't have a sense of culture, to be part of the people. We don't know what they are doing, and what they've done. Without knowing you're part of the people," Lisa continues, "you grow up only in a neighborhood. . . . I'd heard of Michelangelo, but I had no idea about Jan Van Eyck or Socrates. And I thought essays were a kind of homework. I had no idea people were doing that, writing essays for fun, and I love reading them-Adrienne Rich, Ed Abbey. I'm not letting this book go!"

  Venture's success in its first year can be measured by a handful of numbers: sixteen out of the initial twenty students completed the course with full credit. By graduation, two had applied and been accepted into college, one with a full scholarship. Five more students plan to apply when they can find the funding. One student has formed her own nonprofit community garden; three others are implementing curriculum changes in the Head Start Centers where they work. One student has received a promotion, allowing her family to pay all their bills each month for the first time in years.

  But the real effect of the course is more subtle. In an exit evaluation, all students cite greater self-confidence and ability to express opinions, more willingness to engage in debate and in politics. There's more interest in reading and greater use of the local library. Most importantly, as Lisa pointed out, students are now keenly aware of the richness to which they belong, the cultural inheritance that is available to them with a library card. They attend free plays and concerts more frequently. They plan to vote in the next election.

  But with change comes dissatisfaction with the status quo. Students cite a gulf between their interests and that of families and friends. Most want a job requiring more education, more responsibility. They want more respect from the professionals they encounter at work. Now, however, there is determination-and greater confidence—to make change happen. As David Shipler in The Working Poor writes, "people who have repeatedly failed—in school, in love, in work-cannot succeed until they learn that they are capable of success. To get out of poverty, they have to acquire dexterity with their emotions as well as their hands."

  In her final essay for the course, Barbra wrote: "Financially poor or not, I am no longer afraid to walk into a museum, concert hall, grand theater, or other marbled downtown building that I once thought was reserved for the 'rich and smart.' I see these buildings differently. I appreciate them more. Secretly I confuse the names of the columns, but I own the art book to review their names. That I can be a part of, and am a part of, the grand world around me . . . is what I have learned."