>I found it odd that the story seemed to come out of an
>atmosphere of assumption that the poor are stupid and can't
>learn anything.
It seems to me that it's a wide-spread assumption, unfortunately shared even by some leftists who complain that book-learning is either above or irrelevant to the working class in general (not just the poor).
>At the end of the story, what has happened is that some of
>the students have been tracked into bourgeois institutions
>and careers, and their teachers have had a moving, enjoyable,
>and even heart-warming tour of duty.
Shorris ends the article with the point (repeated several times in the narrative) that something other than individual careers (which btw are nothing to scoff at, unless you come from a background that can take college education for granted) is at stake.
At 6:37 PM -0400 4/5/01, Doug Henwood posted:
>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.
Gordon wrote:
>Whatever the poor were given, it was not autonomy.
What is your idea of "autonomy" if it can be "given" to the poor?
>Where's the revolution?
Why expect a revolution at the end of a course in the introduction to the humanities?
Yoshie