The Classics in the Slums | Jonathan Rose
http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_4_urbanities-classics.html
“…like so many postmodern critics, Professor Smith could be naively confident that she was in full possession of the facts, even without the benefit of research. But her theory had no visible means of support. Whenever it was tested, the results were diametrically opposed to what she predicted: in fact ‘the canon’ enabled ‘the masses’ to become thinking individuals. Until fairly recently, Britain had an amazingly vital autodidact culture, where a large minority of the working classes passionately pursued classic literature, philosophy, and music. They were denied the educational privileges that Professor Smith enjoyed, but they knew that the ‘great books’ that she derided would emancipate the workers. […] Kurt Wootton taught English at a Providence high school where the students were almost all black and half of them dropped out before graduation. He assigned them Richard Wright’s Black Boy and jazz by John Coltrane, which they found hopelessly irrelevant. Then he organized ArtsLit, a summer program that brings students from Rhode Island’s worst high schools to the Brown University campus to study and perform Othello, The Taming of the Shrew, Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, García Lorca’s Blood Wedding, Sophocles’ Antigone, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. And these long-dead authors clearly sent the kids a message, as high school teacher Richard Kinslow found when he had his ESL class prepare a production of Macbeth. One of his students was the type who got suspended about once a week, but he would sneak into school for the daily rehearsals. His motivation was precisely the same as Edith Hall’s. ‘These kids had never been actively involved in any part of school except gym and art,’ explained Kinslow. ‘Doing Shakespeare honored them. If you want to talk about self-respect and pride, it made a big difference.'”