During the 2009-2010 school year, I found myself back at the Paseo Academy of the Fine and Performing Arts in Kansas City, Mo. — this time as an instructional coach. This means I was the one on the school’s leadership team who coached the teachers to improve by matching best practices in teaching strategies with effective use of the district’s curriculum. And one day, the principal brought me a student and directed me to tutor them on Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller.
Apparently, the student was having difficulty in the classroom understanding the text to the point that the teacher had referred the student to the office. And despite the fact that working directly with students was not in my official job description, I had learned not to say “no” to this principal unless I had a very good reason, and I did not have one. So I accepted the principal’s directive and met with the student privately while the principal returned to her routine duties.
Joe Marlow
The student was an African American female who was a junior at the school. Although she was friendly and appeared to be bright and eager to learn, I questioned whether she could learn from a dead white male. I was briefly reminded of the 1999 movie The Sixth Sense in which psychologist Malcolm Crowe, played by Bruce Willis, befriends Cole, a traumatized boy played by Haley Joel Osment. A highlight of the film is when Cole confesses to Malcolm, “I see dead people.” Thus, I was concerned my student would see only “dead people” as she began her study of this piece of classic literature.
I was wrong about her — and I was glad. We met several times a week over the next month or so. She was present at all our tutoring sessions and on time, willing and eager to discuss her engagement with the text. I could see her heartfelt connection to Willy Loman, a tired traveling salesman, and his deferred and often quashed dreams that led to his suicide. I also could sense that her connection to Loman was not merely intellectual in that she perhaps knew an adult relative or a friend of the family who had Loman-like deferred or quashed dreams. Since she did not discuss a possible emotional connection, I respected her privacy and did not go there.
But isn’t this why some literature is deemed “classic,” in that such literature reaches beyond boundaries that divide us and unite us because it speaks to the human condition? It would appear so in this case as Arthur Miller had penned a masterpiece of a play that spoke to a student who is a human first and then an African American female living in Kansas City.
Some years ago, I came across a small article describing a program that brought the Greek and Roman classics into a prison classroom. The premise was disarmingly simple: Give ex-felons the intellectual and moral resources they never were offered, and you might give them a fighting chance at not returning to the life that landed them behind bars.
“In an age that treats the classics as decorative or elitist, here they were being used as tools of survival.”
What struck me wasn’t the novelty of the idea but its quiet confidence in the humanities as instruments of moral repair. In an age that treats the classics as decorative or elitist, here they were being used as tools of survival.
The professor in the story taught Homer and Gilgamesh, Aristotle on anger and the Greek tragedians. She asked men who had lived hard, violent lives to wrestle with Achilles’’rage, with Heracles’ self-destruction, with the long arc of consequence that follows a single ungoverned impulse. And the men responded. They recognized themselves in these ancient figures — not in the heroism but in the volatility, the wounded pride and the inability to imagine the downstream cost of a moment’s fury. The old stories gave them a vocabulary for their own interior lives, a way to name the forces that had shaped them long before the criminal justice system ever did.
What moved me most was the program’s underlying wager — that human beings, even those who have done real harm, can be strengthened by serious thought. That moral imagination is not a luxury but a lifeline. These men were not being lectured about responsibility; they were being invited to see themselves in a tragic tradition that understands how fragile agency can be. And in that recognition, something like dignity reentered the room.
As such, they were treated not as cases but as thinkers — people capable of reflection, capable of change. They were equipped to ask questions such as, “What would Shakespeare/Burke/the American Founders do in the situation in which I now find myself?” and then discover answers to their dilemmas that would expand and amplify their moral imaginations.
Programs like this are small, almost invisible in the larger debates about crime and punishment. But they reveal something institutions once knew: that formation precedes behavior, and that without a moral vocabulary, a person is left defenseless against their own impulses. The classics do not redeem anyone. But they do what good institutions always have done — they give a person the means to understand themself, and in that understanding, the possibility of choosing differently.
Based on my experience, classic literature can indeed speak to the poor and the marginalized, across boundaries that tend to divide us, to give us the intellectual tools and the moral imagination for all of us to find success in our lives. For if it cannot, I maintain that it ceases to be the classics. But the genius of the Western canon is that it can unify us out of the many divergent backgrounds from whence we came.
Joe Marlow is a theologian, historian, educator and writer now retired in South Lyon, Mich., with his wife, son, daughter-in-law and their two dogs.
Related:
Reading good literature can develop skills in empathy and compassion, professor says
Want to get started reading Black authors? Here are 10 curated suggestions