I was a Creon until I realized that it put me against Antigone. Now I'm not so sure. Last week, listening to public radio, I heard about the protests against the burial of Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
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Just south of the University of Chicago, at the AKArama Center in Woodlawn, a dozen or so people gather in a seminar room. The room is reminiscent of those in which Nobel laureates and eager college students swap ideas, giving the UofC its reputation as a center for intellectualism. It is sparsely adorned, its tables pushed together to form a hollow square. It is a room designed for focused discussion, for digging into texts, and for exchanging ideas. But the students here are different. Their average age is thirty-nine. Most of them are women. All live at least 150% below the poverty line.

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In "The Art of Freedom," Earl Shorris describes his efforts to establish a set of courses that would teach the core texts of Western civilization to people living in poverty, whose school experience had scanted the canon or skipped it entirely.

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Plato's "Euthyphro" can be tough going for anyone. Amy Thomas Elder struggled last year to make the case that the thorny philosophical text had anything to do with the lives of South Side high school freshmen.

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Do the classics matter? The Common Core State Standards—new, K-12 education rubrics that were rolled out in 2010 and have been implemented in 45 states and Washington, D.C.—seem conflicted about the answer.
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