On the first night of class, Judy Fuwell said a silent prayer that she was doing the right thing. Because, really, who did she think she was, signing up for an eight-month course in the humanities? The humanities! What good would that do? Her husband was so angry, he wasn't speaking to her. "You can't go to school," he said. "Who's going to be home? Who's going to cook dinner?"
At 52, Fuwell has spent most of her life taking care of other people: four children, one of them autistic, and now a father-in-law with Alzheimer's and a grandson whose mother was a meth addict. A few years ago, Fuwell was diagnosed with breast cancer, and before that her husband had been laid off from his factory job. Without health insurance, the family had struggled, and even now their lives were often about just getting through each day. Now she wanted to study philosophy and art history?
She had 19 classmates that first night, including a woman who had spent four years in prison, a single mother who was once homeless and a Baha'i refugee from Iran. They had all signed on for the first-ever Venture Course in the Humanities, a program of the Utah Humanities Council. Funded by two foundations, it offered free books, tuition, child care, bus passes, college professors and eight hours of college credit. The only requirements were that the students be low-income, be able to read newspaper-level English and have a hunger to learn.
On the first night of class, 20 people were nervous, but perhaps only Fuwell said a prayer. Before the night was over, she had her answer in a poem called "The Journey" by Mary Oliver. The teacher, University of Utah English professor Jeff Metcalf, read it out loud:
One day you finally knew/what you had to do, and began/though the voices around you/ kept shouting their bad advice — /though the whole house/began to tremble/and you felt the old tug at your ankles./"Mend my life!"/each voice cried./But you didn't stop/You knew what you had to do.
And then the ending: determined to do/the only thing you could do—/determined to save/ the only life that you could save.
Judy Fuwell heard those words and wept.
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A decade ago, New York author and poverty activist Earl Shorris dreamed up the idea that led to Venture and 14 similar courses across the United States. Shorris, in turn, got the idea from a conversation he had at a maximum-security prison, with a prisoner named Viniece Walker.
"Why do you think people are poor?" Shorris had asked Walker. It was a question he had by then asked hundreds of people. Walker didn't answer him directly but instead told him, "You've got to teach the moral life of downtown to the children. 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."
As Shorris later wrote in an essay in Harper's, Walker didn't mention jobs or money as the way out of poverty. "Who can dress in statues or eat the past?" the writer asked himself, skeptical about the prisoner's idea. But then Shorris decided that maybe Walker was right, that "to enter the public world, to practice the political life, the poor had first to learn to reflect." What was needed were classes in the humanities, he decided. He launched the first program, called The Clemente Course, in 1995.
"The humanities" refer to literature, languages, philosophy, history, but at its heart the name means what it says. Although the teaching of history or literature is sometimes reduced to quotes and dates, the heart of those disciplines is the bigger yet more personal question about how humans should live their lives.
Learning to balance a checkbook may help keep you out of debt, but it won't change your life, says Jean Cheney, who directs the Venture program. But to read Socrates, she says, is to connect yourself to someone who lived 3,000 years ago and then to realize I've had those same thoughts. "That's enormously important for people who feel marginalized," she says.
In Portland, Ore., the Humanity in Perspective program (known as HIP) is in its fifth year. When they were first starting the course, says Christopher Zinn, executive director of the Oregon Council for the Humanities, his staff talked to social service agencies to help find eligible students and were always met with the same skepticism. "Why are you asking us this?" the agencies wanted to know. "These are people with not enough to eat, not enough medications." What has evolved, Zinn says, is a five-year civic conversation about the various ways a person can be poor.
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In mid-November, two months into Utah's Venture program, the 20 students sit in a darkened classroom at Horizonte, the alternative high school where the class meets two evenings a week. Tonight a picture flashes on the pull-down screen: Bernini's massive, ornate St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. In her day job, Jennifer Bauman teaches art history at the University of Utah, to students who mostly are too cool to express their amazement at baroque architecture. But in the Venture class the students exclaim: "Ooooooh."
It's like playing to a black church, Bauman says later about the call-and-response nature of the Venture class. What surprised her the most, she says, was the reverence of the students for learning, their exuberance about every new idea. Chiaroscuro, Mannerism, Vermeer: "Wow."
Sometimes Barbra Moeller arrives late to class, limping on her cane. Moeller is 44, the single mother of three. She attended one year of college after high school — child development and family relations classes, because that's what her husband told her to take, and in fact she says she rarely made a choice of her own for the first 25 years of her life. But in late 2001 she and her children ran away, a decision that found them living in their car as the new year rolled around.
"One night I parked near some trees in Liberty Park," she remembers about a cold February night when she and her children scrunched down into their Hyundai. A policeman's flashlight woke them later, and they were told to move on: No homeless allowed in the park during the Olympics, he said. For the next week, the family slept halfway between Salt Lake City and Tooele, the four of them cramped and freezing in the tiny car. Moeller was working in a 7-Eleven then, her very first job ever. At night, before they fell asleep, they would defrost frozen burritos on the car's heating vents.
Like many of the Venture students, Moeller navigates through a life that is full of compounding troubles. When she was in her mid-30s, she was diagnosed with lupus, and she's been on continuous chemotherapy for more than eight years. Chemo-sabe, she and her children call the life-saving treatments, a nod to the Lone Ranger's faithful friend.
Moeller's pastor told her about the Venture program, which immediately made her think, "I could learn things to teach my children, so their life would be better than mine." Still, she wondered if she wasn't fooling herself that she could do the work. That's a running theme among the Venture students, reinforced for years by parents and teachers and admissions officers who said, "You're not smart enough."
When Bauman describes what the students were like back in September, she remembers their lack of confidence, their fear and fragility, and their inability to make eye contact. "Some were actually shaking," she says.
In December, Bauman takes the class to the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. Standing in front of a piece by Jean-Honore Fragonard, she asks, "What kind of painting are we looking at here?"
"Rococo," answers Charlene Taul.
And so it goes, from room to room. Neoclassical, Impressionist, Abstract. See, Bauman says. "You can go into any museum in the world, whether you've seen the paintings before or not, and talk about them."
This is the counter-balancing theme of the Venture program: You are smart enough.
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In mid-January, at the beginning of the new semester, Westminster philosophy professor Bridget Newell introduces the class to the world's great thinkers by acknowledging how dense the readings will seem. "You'll be looking at the same paragraphs over and over thinking, 'What are they talking about?' " The class will study epistemology and metaphysics, they'll think about what makes a just society, about the nature of mind and soul.
Seventeen students sit at the horseshoe arrangement of tables; the original 20 minus three students who dropped out over Christmas break. Barbra Moeller got pneumonia over the break, but she's back.
"It's easy not to study these questions, because they're hard," Newell tells the class. But the questions will stretch you, she says, in the same way hard physical labor stretches muscle. And so they launch into Socrates.
"One thing he did was question authority," Newell says.
"Really?" asks Lisa DeHerrera.
"Lisa loves him already," laughs Steve Acevedo.
DeHerrera, the class rebel — always ready to defend the oppressed and the endangered — is astounded to find out Socrates was found guilty of corrupting the youths of Athens. At 34, DeHerrera is a veteran of a year at the Utah State Prison and three years at the Nevada Women's Correctional Facility, on drug charges. "I was hell-bent on screwing up my life," she explains. In prison, out of boredom, she began reading whatever she could find, as long as it wasn't a romance novel. She read "Moby Dick," "The Divine Comedy" and "The Grapes of Wrath."
When she got out, she was terrified. "When you're in prison for three years you have time to think. I started looking at the women around me, women in their 40s and 50s and 60s, and I realized they're going to keep doing the same thing till they die. And I thought, I don't know how I'm going to change it, but I can't be that 50-year-old woman."
Her mom encouraged her to apply to the Venture program. "I will never forget that day," DeHerrera says about being accepted. "Never in my life has anybody that's not my family welcomed me with open arms."
The winter-spring semester includes philosophy, a continuation of Jean Cheney's critical writing class and American history. The teacher is Jack Newell, professor emeritus at the University of Utah. Newell is less interested in dates and treaties than in big ideas that have shaped the country's collective psyche.
"What makes a good life?" Jack Newell asks.
Happiness, safety, health, wealth, peace of mind, the students answer. Newell then introduces them to American philosopher Mortimer Ad—ler's list: liberty, justice, mercy, equality, beauty and truth — ideas that won't directly pay the rent but will definitely ruin a good life if they're absent.
In Cheney's writing class one night, the students debate Edward Abbey's essay "Down the River." Soon Moeller is taking issue with Abbey's motives, and several other students join in to defend the maverick author. When the class is over, on her way out of the room, Moeller is a little shaken but also astounded: She had dared to express an opinion, other people had disagreed, and she was still standing! The message was unmistakable: In a civilized society, it's OK to debate, to learn from each other, to have a voice. What's important to learn, Jack Newell says later, is that "if I'm going to have a reflective life, I have to understand what other people think."
There's such a thing as "cultural capital," argues Alfred Lubrano, author of "Living in Limbo: Blue Collar Roots, White Collar Dreams." Picasso, creme br$lee, Mozart, stock portfolios: These are the things a middle-class student might know about even before going to college. Lubrano grew up in a blue-collar family in Brooklyn and commuted to Columbia University. He was a senior before he knew what an internship was.
More importantly, middle-class parents are more likely to take the time to explain "why," said Lubrano when he spoke at Westminster College this past winter. In middle-class families, everyone talks more. If you counted the number of words spoken, there would simply be more of them.
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One night in March, Cheney leads the class through a discussion of a poem by Richard Wilbur called "The Writer." In the poem, the narrator is listening to his daughter write a story: from her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys/like a chain hauled over a gunwale; and then the keys go quiet, as if the whole house is thinking; and then the daughter starts typing again. The sound reminds Wilbur of a dazed starling that had been trapped in the same room two years before, how it tried again and again to find the right window to fly out.
The students talk about their own writing life, how they feel like that bird sometimes, flapping their wings trying to free some thought. "I'm thinking about it all the time, wherever I am, in the shower, everywhere," says Dot Richeda about the papers she writes for her classes. At 62, Richeda is the oldest student, a woman who grew up in a Japanese family that thought women should walk two steps behind. She works as an office manager in a cheese factory.
"Sometimes I look at the things I wrote and I think, 'That doesn't even sound like me,' " adds Flora Beckstrom. "Where does it come from? Like, who entered my mind? Maybe I'm having dinner with philosophy guests and don't know it."
By April, the students have read Neruda and Sappho, Jefferson and Descartes. They have written dozens of papers. They have debated whether God is a woman and whether JFK was a good president. One more student has dropped out by now, but 16 students are still coming to class each night — despite day jobs and new complications. One student's sister has just been sent to prison, leaving the student and her mom to take care of the sister's baby. Moeller has been hospitalized with respiratory problems and is behind on her work.
But everyone is feeling confident. And it's not just the positive feedback and their newfound voices that are having an impact, says literature teacher Metcalf. It's the ideas themselves: The humanities offer "hope and promise," he says, and, according to history professor Jack Newell, "they force you to examine your assumptions. ... You begin to live more consciously, to reflect on the decisions you make."
In philosophy class one night, the topic is existentialism and Jean-Paul Sartre's essay "Are You Free?" Bridget Newell explains Sartre's explanation of the difference between essence and existence. With a machine, its essence — its purpose — is imagined first, then the thing is created. But with people, according to Sartre, existence comes first, because there is no ultimate purpose. People, according to Sartre, are "radically free."
Sartre wouldn't say we choose the circumstances we're born into or everything that happens to us, Newell tells them. "But we determine what we become. We choose how we respond." Being free in this way carries a huge burden of responsibility, she says, and a certain anguish and forlornness. She bends over as she lists each burden, making her body sink lower and lower so that she is now walking like Groucho Marx.
Over on her side of the room, Moeller is taking all this in. "You would think freedom is something that's pleasant," she says. "But it takes away the excuses." Reading Sartre, she says, has made her question her own life. Did she end up homeless not because she was a victim but because of something else? After reading Sartre, she had to say to herself: "You made choices. Let's review them."
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On a perfect spring evening, as the sun lowered in a cloudless sky, the Venture Class graduated in a ceremony at Westminster College. Family and friends stood up and cheered as each name was read, and when Gina Zivkovic walked across the stage, her son yelled, "That's my mama!"
How do you measure the impact of eight months of reading and writing and thinking? In Oregon, where a similar course has been ongoing for five years, the changes are often quiet ones, says the director: more books checked out of the public library, more lectures and plays and civic meetings attended by the course's graduates.
"I used to believe that, because I was poor, the world was not open to me," said Moeller one morning near the end of the semester. "I thought you had to have the right ticket and the right shoes. You're reminded all the time, when you're poor, what you don't have. But you don't need a ticket. You can walk into a museum and you don't have to hide from anyone."
The Venture program has received a grant to provide follow-up classes for Moeller and her classmates next year. And applications are now being accepted for the second Venture class, which will begin in September.
Meanwhile, Moeller has decided to get herself and her children involved in next fall's elections, Gina Zivkovic is setting up a nonprofit to create urban gardens, and Judy Fuwell has been accepted into the University of Utah. Her husband, so resistant at first to the idea of his wife going to school, is now reading the poetry books she leaves on the nightstand.
How to apply
The Utah Humanities Council's Venture Program, funded by donations from the A.H.E. Cultural Initiative and The Humanities Connection, is accepting applications for 2006-07. Applicants must be low-income, have not completed college and have a newspaper-level comprehension of English. For more information, contact the UHC at 359-9670 or visit www.utahhumanities.org/Venture.htm.
An exhibit about Venture, including portraits of the class of '06 by photographer Kent Miles and excerpts from student writings, is on display on the lower level of the Salt Lake City Library, 210 E. 400 South, through June 25.
E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com