Humanities 101

BY MARGO PFEIFF

In the summer of 1999, Andrew Sharpe didn’t know where his next meal was coming from. The 43-year-old Quebec native was living on welfare in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, an inner-city neighbourhood that is Canada’s poorest postal code with the country’s highest rate of HIV infection. His run-down hotel room was at the centre of this crime-riddled neighbourhood, where prostitutes openly vied for business alongside drug dealers.

A high-school dropout, Sharpe struggled to survive on $500 a month. He lined up at food banks, frequented churches and libraries in a quest to heal his spirit and attended Narcotics Anonymous to cope with his substance abuse. Then he spotted a poster on a telephone pole. “Free University,” it promised. He signed up immediately.

By early September Sharpe was riding a bus across town to Point Grey, one of Canada’s wealthiest suburbs, to attend a unique program at the University of British Columbia (UBC). He was among 25 adults aged 20 to 62 with widely varied backgrounds—single mothers, AIDS sufferers, new immigrants, ex-convicts, drug addicts, homeless people and others just down on their luck. What they shared was an income below the poverty line, the ability to read a newspaper and a passion for learning—the only prerequisites for an eight-month course called Humanities 101.

Every Tuesday and Thursday evening, after most students had left the campus, the group gathered in a classroom where they were taught first year level philosophy, literature, architecture, economics and poetry by established professors and instructors who volunteered their time.

The course stoked Sharpe’s thirst for learning. He devoured assignments, prowled the computer lab and university library stacks. As his confidence grew, Sharpe began to regain a foothold on his life. He started a running club in the Downtown Eastside and pressed Humanities 101 administrators to help him enter UBC as a regular student.

Three years later, in November 2002, a fit-looking 46-year-old Andrew Sharpe sips coffee in the Downtown Eastside’s popular Radio Station Café, where he is now manager. He has completed his second year of an arts degree.

“Humanities 101 opened up a world of possibility I never experienced before,” he says. “Showing people a different way of thinking—education —brings light.”

Sharpe is one of some 100 people who have graduated from Humanities 101 since it began in the fall of 1998. Three alumni now attend UBC, and many more are enrolled in community and technical colleges. Others have become self-employed or taken up volunteerism, community activism, acting careers; one even ran for mayor. Almost all have felt their lives profoundly affected.

“We’re not trying to make people employable or get them off drugs,” says former Humanities 101 director, Dr. Clint Burnham, who still teaches in the program. “We’re trying to reawaken their desire for knowledge. Our success is in helping people get a grip on their lives in small ways—as another piece of the puzzle or a step up the ladder.”

Humanities for the poor was the brainchild of U.S. author Earl Shorris, who had the idea of teaching Socrates and Shakespeare to the underprivileged in 1995 while researching a book on poverty. “The poor in America have been cheated,” Shorris maintained. “They get job skills—that’s all.” So, at New York City’s Roberto Clemente Family Guidance Centre, he arranged for volunteer professors to teach a one-year college level course in humanities to young adults living below the poverty line.

The outcome shocked everyone, Shorris most of all. Students not only gained self-confidence and motivation but also began to resolve conflicts through reflection and negotiation rather than reaction. Many went on to seek higher education.

Shorris’s social experiment spread rapidly. New York’s Bard College was the first to offer credit for the Clemente course. Variations on this course are now conducted in 37 cities across the United States, Mexico and Australia. In Canada there is just one: Vancouver’s Humanities 101.

That initiative began in spring 1998, when UBC students Am Johal and Allison Dunnet discussed an article about the Clemente course they had read in Harper’s Magazine. The pair decided that a program helping those outside the university community would be a perfect candidate for UBC’s new Innovative Projects Fund (IPF). To meet the funding deadline, the pair spoke briefly with a few professors, then hastily drafted a proposal for a $15,000 grant.

The project was immediately approved, and Johal and Dunnet quickly set about preparing the first Humanities 101 program for the 1998-99 term. Professors in a broad range of humanities—English, history, art history, anthropology, film, sociology and philosophy—volunteered to teach. The grant covered bus passes for the students’ 45-minute ride to UBC from the Downtown Eastside; child care, if needed; and a meal before class.

During that summer of 1998, students were carefully screened for the first session. One successful applicant was 42-year-old Lou Parsons, who was subsisting on $6,500 a year, sleeping in a basement workshop alongside the bicycle frames he constructed for a meagre living. Parsons had dropped out of school three days into Grade 11. Signed up for the Free University, he was both excited and terrified. He had often fantasized about returning to school but had been told all his life he wasn’t good enough.

On the first evening, Parsons almost fled several times as he walked towards the classroom. He nervously took a seat. When the instructor strode in, Parsons froze: He knew by his gait that Jonathan Wender was a police officer. Parsons’s memories of frequent run-ins with the law flooded in, and only a sheer effort of will kept him in his chair. Wender introduced himself as a “philosopher/cop,” a police officer from the state of Washington who was teaching philosophy while studying for his doctorate in criminology. Parsons relaxed as he realized with wonder: This guy is a Ph.D. candidate who comes here to teach us without pay in his spare time.

That first night Jonathan Wender taught Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, a profound tale of men chained all their lives in the darkness of a cave. The only light is a fire behind them, and figures passing in front of the flames carry shapes that send strange shadows onto the facing wall. Those shadows are their only reality. When one of the men escapes and sees the outside world, he returns to enlighten those who remain chained, but is greeted with disbelief and hostility; they prefer to cling to their own familiar reality.

As Wender spoke he saw his students’ faces transformed as the realization sank in that poverty or social isolation was their own cave, and each of them would remain trapped within it unless they saw the light of reality. It’s like watching the prisoners casting off their chains, Wender thought, and he felt himself becoming choked up with emotion.

One student, 53-year-old Jeysoca, was particularly moved and also astonished that she could understand a highbrow subject like philosophy. This isn’t rocket science! she thought. The former graphic designer, who had fallen on hard times after an illness, sat on the edge of her seat with excitement. “We are all living Plato every day of our lives!” she blurted out.

“The Allegory of the Cave particularly resonates in people who’ve had a troubled background,” says Wender. “Other students might understand the allegory on an intellectual level, but for many of the Humanities 101 students, there is a deep personal connection that they draw between the story and their own lives. It is truly humbling to teach this class.”

When Lou Parsons walked out of Wender’s class at the end of the evening, his head was reeling with new ideas. By the end of the term, he was confident he could handle the studying required to achieve the higher education he had always dreamed about. He registered at college for a year, then took the leap to UBC, where he is now in fourth-year geography. “With learning, I experienced a form of power I had never felt before,” he says. “It has turned my life around.”

In the Humanities 101 classroom, students are treated like ordinary undergraduates, but for Jeysoca that is something special. “When you are poor, you are spiritually and emotionally abused,” she says. “In Humanities 101 there is respect; they listen to what you have to say. They don’t talk down to you. This experience is telling me, ‘You’re good enough to do this!’ and it’s giving me the confidence to face my own dragons.”

“Locking people up doesn’t change them. Nor does giving them a vocational skill,” says Wender. “But if you show them their own dignity—the mystery of their own existence—then you can change them.”

For the professors involved in Humanities 101, the course is a two-way learning street. Dr. Susanna Egan, former associate head of UBC’s English department, didn’t know what to expect when she stepped in front of her first class. The elegant English-schooled professor had just begun her lesson on autobiographical writing by explaining the craft’s roots in the 5th-century theological treatises of Saint Augustine when a student exclaimed: “Doesn’t he just take your breath away? The City of God just leaps off the page, doesn’t it?” Egan was speechless. She hadn’t expected the students to have heard of Augustine, let alone read him.

“Many of these students are deeply educated without having gone to school,” she says. “They have been educated by the lives they lead.” And by long hours spent in libraries, rare oases of welcome for the underprivileged. “This class is so stimulating, I can’t sleep for a while afterwards,” says Egan. “I love it.”

Young undergraduates often take courses because they’re required to, not because they are interested in them. But in Humanities 101, students show a hunger for knowledge that is almost palpable. Instead of a formal lecture structure, the class is conducted like a Socratic forum in which interaction between students and professor is encouraged.

In teaching economics, Peter Babiak, the program’s current director, covers selections from The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith’s classic treatise on political economics. As he spoke to one class of the concept of “supply and demand,” explaining the theory of the “invisible hand” of capitalism organizing the world, Babiak noticed his students becoming visibly agitated; being poor, it was not a concept they liked.

“If there is an invisible hand organizing supply and demand in the market,” someone piped up, “what is the other hand doing?” Someone else chimed in: “The other hand is a fist keeping you and me in place.” Babiak laughs at the memory of the passionate debate that overtook the rest of that class.

After each 90-minute lecture there is a break, and students are split into small discussion groups led by tutors. Students are well prepared for class, have thought about the material and are bursting with questions and opinions. “In my undergrad classes, it’s a chore to get students to speak,” says Babiak. “In Humanities 101, it’s sometimes a chore to get them to calm down and listen for a moment.”

The course is profoundly important to participants. Wender remembers one student arriving late. “I’m sorry,” he apologized, “I just found out my father died, but I didn’t want to miss your class.”

Of the 25 students who start the course each September, about 20 usually graduate. “That’s amazing considering the pressures,” says Babiak. “Some of these people are very ill or live under horrible social and economic conditions—and yet they show up.”

For the first two years, the program was supported mainly by the IPF grant; then the president’s office stepped in with recurring funds. The $50,000 annual budget covers students’ expenses and three paid part-time staff members. Each term there are 24 professors and instructors on the roster and scores more have offered their time. The program has attracted guest speakers like architect Arthur Erickson, and students are regularly given tickets by concert halls and theatres to attend operas, symphony performances and plays.

Humanities 101 comes to a close with a graduation ceremony in April, held in the dramatic setting of UBC’s Museum of Anthropology. After a graduating address, each student receives a certificate and is encouraged to speak. “I didn’t even learn how to read until I was 54,” said one woman, “so I can’t believe I’m standing here now.” Others have read poems or sung short songs they have composed. It is an emotionally charged evening and tears flow freely.

Forty-year-old Debra Preston, who has struggled with troubles for many years, declared, “Humanities 101 started a chain reaction; I woke up and changed myself.” She has started her own housekeeping business and is now writing a book. “The learning,” she said, “doesn’t stop when you walk out of the classroom.”

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