Teach public school kids the classic books

People from Queens tend to believe in miracles. Especially people like me, who were kids in the 1980s. I had come from the Dominican Republic in 1985, just before my 12th birthday, with baseball in my brain. We lived a stone’s throw away from Shea Stadium. Lighting is not supposed to strike the same target twice, and it had taken a miracle for the Mets to win the World Series in 1969. But in 1986 — my first American baseball season — lighting struck again. I took it personally. My life felt charmed.

That was not the only miracle I experienced as a recent immigrant living in Queens. One cold winter night, my nextdoor neighbors in Corona threw out a bunch of books and I got to them before the garbage truck did. Among the books I rescued was a collection of dialogues by Plato that record the last days of Socrates. The life and career that finding Socrates started me on has been as improbable as the outcome of 1986 World Series.

Many years later, having gone through the undergraduate “great books” program at Columbia University, earned a Ph.D. and become director of its Core Curriculum, I wondered if low-income high school students who, like me, hoped to be the first in their families to attend college, would experience the “great books” in the same life-altering way I did.

So in 2009, along with colleagues from Columbia’s Center for American Studies and the Roger Lehecka Double Discovery Center, I helped found the Freedom and Citizenship program. The idea was simple: bring 15 rising high-school seniors from low-income families to spend the month of July living on campus and studying the classics with a Columbia professor. The goal was not only to equip them with tools for academic achievement but to help them envision for themselves lives of active and empowered citizenship.

All 15 high school students in that first cohort went to college, some to Ivy League and similarly competitive schools. Many of them went on to graduate school. One of them, Shaun Abreu, was sworn in last week as a Manhattan city councilman. Since 2009, the Freedom and Citizenship program has tripled in size, now serving 45 low-income students each summer, at no cost to them, and providing mentorship and college guidance during their senior year of high school.

Ninety-nine percent of our students graduate college within six years and 27% of them go on to pursue advanced degrees.

At the foundation of the program’s success is a daily seminar where students read and discuss Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King and James Baldwin, among others. From the beginning, we bet on the idea that these thinkers and these texts were not beyond the students’ grasp, and that they could speak to issues of urgency in our students’ lives.

We do a disservice to our neediest high school students when we dilute the curriculum away from the classics. At John Bowne High School, my local public school, I had the good fortune to read Sophocles, Shakespeare, Franz Kafka, Henry David Thoreau, Toni Morrison and many other canonical writers in my classes. That opened the door not only to a place like Columbia, but to a life of intellectual expansion, social engagement and inner growth. Our students today, especially our low-income students, many of whom carry the hopes and aspirations of entire communities, deserve the same opportunity. Classic texts are not too hard for them, they are not irrelevant to their lives, and they are not only for affluent people.

The push for culturally responsive curricula, of which incoming Schools Chancellor

David Banks is a proponent, is admirable and indeed necessary. But incorporating diverse perspectives into the classroom must not mean putting aside the classics. Treating our students as if they can only see themselves in works that reflect their own cultural experience is an act of condescension.

Students can also see themselves in Socrates defense of the search for truth, in Macbeth’s lust for power, in Don Quijote’s idealism, and in Oedipus’s inner turmoil. We must teach a diverse set of works as part of, not instead of, the classics. After all, any meaningful conception of “classics” from the post-World War period will be as diverse as our student body.

Chancellor Banks and Mayor Adams have spoken plainly about how public schools have failed our most vulnerable students. Their commitment to reform presents an exciting opportunity. A major contribution would be a renewed emphasis in the high school curriculum on the tradition of humanism, inquiry and moral progress embodied in our literary classics.

Montás is senior lecturer in American studies and English at Columbia University and director of the Freedom and Citizenship Program. He is the author of “Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation.”