Poverty-stricken offered glimpse of academic life

from The Toronto Star

Trinity College course one of several to stress abstract thinking skills

Louise Brown
Education Reporter

It's a radical notion for the Ivory Tower: Invite people from the margins of society – on welfare, in shelters, the working poor, the emotionally fragile – to come soak in the world of ideas.

Not for job training, not for credit, but simply to feed their minds and maybe, slowly, begin to imagine a way out of poverty.

A politically bold little project this fall at the University of Toronto's historic Trinity College – where students still wear black gowns to meetings – brought to campus 25 low-income adults, for free samples of an intellectual diet they could not have afforded on their own. They had no academic credentials except a hunger for ideas and the will to read a book a week.

It is the newest in a crop of programs across North America designed to introduce the poor to the humanities, from Macbeth to Machiavelli, and help them hone the skills of abstract thinking. "I've been away from this kind of learning for a long time, and it is wonderful for your self-esteem to know you haven't forgotten how to think deeply," said Rwandan refugee Eugene Sandora, who works the night shift as a laboratory cleaner to support himself and send money back home.

As a boy, Sandora's dream of university was crushed by political turmoil. He has worked at low-paying cooking and cleaning jobs since coming to Canada in 1989. But at 49, his recent taste of the liberal arts has begun to stretch his horizons.

"It's like when metal gets rusty, you clean it with oil. And that's what this program has done – made me see that I can learn if I get the chance."

From cashiers and cleaners to those unable to work at all, these non-traditional scholars came to ivy-draped Trinity each Thursday night for 13 weeks to hear lectures on the heavy-hitters of western thought – Machiavelli and Hobbes and Simone de Beauvoir – delivered for free by blue-ribbon speakers such as former premier Bob Rae and culture guru Mark Kingwell.

Alongside them at every step – for a hot meal first in the stately residence hall, the one-hour lecture, then 45-minute discussion groups of five or six and a final wrap-up forum – were 17 young undergraduate philosophy buffs who volunteered to take part in the outreach program.

Third-year Trinity student Katie Noble said she found it enriching to meet Manar Banimelhem, a chemical engineer from Jordan, who now works at Tim Hortons because she can't find a job in her field. "Hearing the lecture was good, but getting to know people like Manar was what made Thursday my favourite day of the week," said Noble.

For Banimelhem, the course introduced "a new way of thinking, even for someone who went to university for engineering," she said. "The humanities leave you wondering about very different questions."

Humanities For Humanity is the pet project of two Trinity staff members, who modelled it after a concept in the United States, called "Clemente Programs" because the original 1997 program was set up in New York's Roberto Clemente Family Guidance Center by founding professor Earl Shorris.

"If you give people access to ideas that matter, things like gender and class and how society was organized, even in medieval times, it makes you think differently about the world," said philosophy professor John Duncan, director of Trinity's Ethics, Society and Law program.

Kelley Castle, Trinity's dean of students, says this kind of outreach can help marginalized people stop reacting to circumstances and begin to find the confidence to set their own course.

"Education is about freedom," said Castle, "the freedom to feel more connected with the world."

A $20,000 grant from the university allowed the program to remove as many financial barriers as possible, providing free textbooks, bus tickets and babysitting. It's clicked so well, for both the rookies and academic veterans, that it's been extended into the new year.

"This is the most amazing experience I've had in four years at university," said history major Colin Rose, "a chance to get way beyond the university atmosphere.

"We were studying the legend of King Arthur one week and discussing the concept of forgiveness, as in: Should Arthur forgive Lancelot?" recalled Rose, "when one of the students from Rwanda started talking about the genocide in his country and how you deal with forgiveness after something like that.

"Suddenly our group went silent. It gives you a whole new perspective."