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When we talk about higher education for the poor, we often mean community colleges and getting a degree in order to make more money. But 20 years ago, a writer in New York City decided that the poorest members of society should have the same access as wealthier people to learning, just for the sake of learning.

I visited one of these programs - called a Clemente course - in Harlem on a Thursday night.

"Can you live in a good life in a society where people are doing different things?" asks the teacher. "Of course," replies a student.

Sitting in on a Clemente course is like watching a bunch of passionate freshman staying up all night in their dorm debating an assignment.

But rather than a room full of teenagers, the students ranged in age from mid-20s to their 70s. They have to be low-income to attend and they are all interviewed before being accepted.

Among the nearly 30 students in this class, there's a rape survivor who says she suffers from panic attacks. There's a former inmate who's now a prison reform advocate. And there are several working mothers like Renee Mitchell.

"I was so freaking nervous," Mitchell says, "because I felt so dumb. You know, I felt like I was too old."

Mitchell is a secretary who came to this class, held at a Harlem social service agency, last fall. The Clemente course is for low-income adults wishing to study philosophy, history and art. She thought it could help her get a college degree, and earn more money. But Mitchell recalls how hard it was when she tried to write her first philosophy paper.

"Remember when I kept saying I couldn't do it?" Mitchell asks her philosophy teacher, David Kittay.

"I remember," he says, laughing.

Kittay also teaches religion at Columbia University. He started this particular course in Harlem, after reading an obituary for Clemente's founder, Earl Shorris, who died three years ago. Starling Lawrence, of the publishing company W.W. Norton, was his editor.

"His solution to poverty was to encourage a life of, insofar as it was possible, a life of reflection," says Lawrence. "He said if you are armed with that, if you can deal with the things that life throws at you, then you can handle those things."

The Clemente course is now in 24 sites in the United States, plus several other countries. Lawrence still serves as its president. Those who finish can earn six credits for college. Clemente's leaders say 10,000 people have attended over the past 20 years and more than half of them have completed it. Each course is independently run. The Harlem one partners with Bard College.

Kittay says a lot of his students struggled at first, but eventually they get it. "It's amazing," he says. "There's so much wisdom. And when we study philosophy and literature, that's about wisdom."

"Yes," says Mitchell, "like I never even knew about these people like Descartes and Kant."

For her, it was eye-opening.

"Just to read about, people like, even Socrates, of course I've heard of him, but just reading about all of these great thinkers," Mitchell says, "it made me feel like I missed something, realizing that there's different ways to think about something that I thought about all the time."

You hear that a lot at Clemente. Another student, Vanessa Koritsi, says she sees how history, like great works of literature, connects to what's going on today.

"What we experienced, now, they were doing the same thing, thinking the same thoughts, having the same issues, whether it's politics, whether it's gender, whether it's war," Koritsi says. "Whatever, it was the same life happening."

Until a few years ago, Koritsi was an undocumented immigrant working odd jobs in the restaurant industry. But she was granted asylum because of the persecution she faced back home in Trinidad and Tobago. Koritsi is transgender. She's now living in a homeless shelter while figuring out her next steps. For the first time, she's yearning to go to college.

"I can't worry with expenses. I got this far, as I am," Koritsi says. "It can be done, and there are ways of getting assistance."

Kittay was so impressed by Koritsi's 40-page essay about Plato's Cave that he's trying to help her get into Columbia. But he freely acknowledges other Clemente students have trouble with academic writing, which is why he brought in some tutors. He's now fundraising to expand the program in New York, even if college ultimately isn't for everyone.

"We have a lot of people this year and last year who may not desire to go on with and seek a college education," Kittay says.

And that's OK, he says, because the primary goal is to just expose them to the power of learning.

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Adult Course Offers Learning For The Sake Of Learning

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When we talk about higher education for the poor, we often mean community colleges and getting a degree in order to make more money. But 20 years ago, a writer in New York City decided that the poorest members of society should have the same access as wealthier people to learning, just for the sake of learning.

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The first Catholic Jubilee school in Memphis opened in 1999 just as the Roman Catholic Church, on the threshold of its Third Millennium, was preparing to celebrate the Year of Jubilee in 2000.

"The century and the millennium now beginning will need to see to what length of dedication the Christian community can go in charity towards the poorest," Pope John Paul II said. "There is a special presence of Christ in the poor, and this requires the Church to make a preferential option for them."

For the next two decades, that faith-based preferential option for the poor was exercised most notably and nobly here by the Memphis Jubilee Catholic Schools, a faith-based initiative launched by former Bishop J. Terry Steib and former Catholic schools superintendent Mary McDonald.

The 11 parochial schools provided thousands of mostly low-income children in the city's most distressed neighborhoods a safe, nurturing educational environment at little or no cost, thanks to local philanthopy.

Unlike most private, faith-based schools, Jubilee schools accepted any students, regardless of test scores, previous academic or behavior records, or a family's ability to pay.

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Kids wait for a ride home after school at the Catholic High School on McLean. The entire Memphis Catholic Jubilee Schools network, along with St. Michael Catholic School, will close at the end of the 2018-19 year, the Catholic Diocese of Memphis said on Tuesday. (Photo: Jim Weber/The Commercial Appeal)

Nearly all students have received tuition support. All families have paid something, but some as little as $10 a month. Students who graduated from the elementary schools have received scholarships to Catholic middle and high schools.

The schools also have provided all students who need them with uniforms, daily hot breakfasts and lunches, weekend snack packs, holiday food baskets, health screenings, and tutoring, as well as parenting workshops, and literacy and jobs skill programs.

"Memphis has become a model or inspiration for Catholic schools in other parts of the country," Dr. Karen Ristau, then president of the National Catholic Education Association, told The Commercial Appeal in 2012.

That was the year five students from the first Jubilee kindergarten class at St. Augustine Elementary School graduated from high school.

Sadly, next year will mark the eighth and final Jubilee Schools graduation. The Catholic Diocese of Memphis has announced that all Jubilee schools, including Memphis Catholic High, will close in 2019, just as Memphis is on the threshold of its third century.

The largesse of local donors, which built a $30 million endowment, just isn't enough to sustain a school system annually serving more than 1,400 mostly non-Catholic and poor students.

"Funding for the schools has been provided primarily through a trust funded by very generous donors plus annual fundraising," the diocese said in a news release Tuesday. "That trust is nearly depleted."

Diocesan officials say the schools would have been able to remain open if state legislators had approved a voucher system, allowing tax dollars to be used for private schools.

Perhaps. But the Jubilee schools were started to give low-income families in distressed neighborhoods a faith-based alternative, and, in particular, a Catholic schools alternative, to public schools. That's work for the church, not the state.

In a 2012 interview with The Commercial Appeal, the two local philanthropists who provided the initial $12 million in funding anonymously, said they were drawn to "the historic mission and excellence of the Catholic school system."

It's a shame the diocese itself never provided the Jubilee schools with a regular source of operating funds, although it did provide scholarships to Catholic middle and high schools as well as the actual school buildings.

A charter school network is expected to apply to open new schools to replace each of the closed Jubilee schools in the same locations, beginning in Fall 2019. But the new schools would be public charters, not private or parochial schools.

The first six Jubilee schools were opened in inner-city Catholic schools that had been closed for financial reasons - shifting demographics, declining enrollments and rising expenses.

"When we closed those schools, we left more than buildings behind. We left children, and those children need us now more than ever," McDonald said in 2012.

That's as true now as it was then. If the church can't find the resources to keep those schools open, let's hope public and private forces can work together to reopen those schools again.

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Closing of Jubilee Schools a blow to city, church, children

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The first Catholic Jubilee school in Memphis opened in 1999 just as the Roman Catholic Church, on the threshold of its Third Millennium, was preparing to celebrate the Year of Jubilee in 2000. "The century and the millennium now beginning will need to see to what length of dedication the Christian community can go in charity towards the poorest," Pope John Paul II said.

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Slight connection, but still useful.

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Need to look for numbers on illiteracy rates in Memphis and compare them to rates across the South.

Need to look at global numbers on literacy, and see which countries are most successful.