Yoshie Furuhashi:
> 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.
Actually it's not at stake. I've seen talented people brought out of the underclass since I was old enough to know what was going on. Each time, everyone was astounded. The bureaucrats and professors patted themselves on the back, and the saved were then given jobs like real people, often displacing other slightly less marginal types, and 90 or 95 or 99 percent of the communities they came from were ignored and forgotten. Or am I wrong? Are the ghettoes and trailer parks seething with the arts and letters after all these years?
Gordon wrote:
>> Whatever the poor were given, it was not autonomy.
Yoshie Furuhashi:
> What is your idea of "autonomy" if it can be "given" to the poor?
When Castro took over Cuba, I've been told, most of the population couldn't read. So he started a literacy program, but it wasn't just professional teachers and dumb students haled in out of the cane fields. One of the principles was "each one, teach another". So the program was self-sustaining. Whatever Castro's faults and errors may have been, in this case he was imparting a little autonomy to the folk, instead of handing them the enthusiast of slavery Aristotle excusing the slavemaster Tom Jefferson over the centuries. In effect, he was giving them back what they would have had if it hadn't been robbed from them.
> >Where's the revolution?
> Why expect a revolution at the end of a course in the introduction to
> the humanities?
The fact of the poor, the fact of class and class war, cry out for revolution, do they not? What kind of humanities don't respond to it?