A liberal education encourages us to look at ourselves and the world, and to ask questions. Our endeavors with this project have led all of us involved to a deeper, more whole, and more profound sense of who we are individually and how we fit into this world of ours. We've learned how to identify and address problems within ourselves and in the world, and how to begin to work together for positive change.
The CWC’s mission is varied. At one level, the program is a service-learning seminar for qualified GVSU students. The seminar introduces them to principles of community organizing, giving them a chance to experience the work associated with putting together a comprehensive community or prison program from the ground up. It also includes readings and discussions in political philosophy, pedagogy, American social history and other relevant disciplines—readings that provide context for understanding the work we do in the community and the prison. At another level, the settings for the seminar—away from the traditional classroom and working with a population the students ordinarily know little about—raise existentially and with some urgency questions that usually are only encountered theoretically and casually in the university. Why are people poor? Incarcerated? What is the relation of education—especially the humanities—to justice? To power? What is the proper balance between individual rights and the individual’s responsibility to address, or promote, the common good? Why does race seem to play such a big role in our work? How much power do we as individuals have to change societal conditions we find disturbing? Are the humanities as fundamental to a notion of “the good life” as we’ve been taught? What don’t we know about how other people live and work and think that we ought? And so on.
At the heart of this inquiry is the question of the value of a liberal arts education. Alongside more traditional understandings of its value, can it also be seen as the surest antidote to poverty, to political exclusion, to alienation? Is an education grounded in critical familiarity with the classics from all traditions one of the most powerful ways to reach not only certain egalitarian and humanitarian aims but economic ones as well? Is learning to articulate one’s interests in increasingly powerful ways a path to democratic renewal? Nothing less than the answers to these questions—from the point of view of all of those involved in the program—is seen to be at stake.
Having developed a curriculum and logistical framework for the Working Classics program, GVSU students then become teachers and organizers in the field. They are responsible for recruiting students from the community, presenting the program to agency directors in the area, producing flyers, making the necessary phone calls, and, finally, facilitating a classroom of their own. This teaching, and the relationships that develop from it, comprise the “service” element of the course, which is the centerpiece of our work. Students have offered instruction in ethics, literature, philosophy, history, music, anatomy, math, and many other disciplines.
The course also introduces the discipline of meditation to both the GVSU students and the inmates at Muskegon Correctional Facility. This is done in a non-sectarian way, focusing on the integrative benefits of increased concentration and reflective ability. Some time each session is devoted to basic “mindfulness” meditation, and further readings exploring various teachings on meditation and contemplation from a number of traditions are made available to students.