"Why do you think people are poor?" Shorris had asked Walker. It was a question he had by then asked hundreds of people. Walker didn't answer him directly but instead told him, "You've got to teach the moral life of downtown to the children. And the way you do that, Earl, is by taking them downtown to plays, museums, concerts, lectures, where they can learn the moral life of downtown."

As Shorris later wrote in an essay in Harper's, Walker didn't mention jobs or money as the way out of poverty. "Who can dress in statues or eat the past?" the writer asked himself, skeptical about the prisoner's idea. But then Shorris decided that maybe Walker was right, that "to enter the public world, to practice the political life, the poor had first to learn to reflect." What was needed were classes in the humanities, he decided. He launched the first program, called The Clemente Course, in 1995.

"The humanities" refer to literature, languages, philosophy, history, but at its heart the name means what it says. Although the teaching of history or literature is sometimes reduced to quotes and dates, the heart of those disciplines is the bigger yet more personal question about how humans should live their lives.

Learning to balance a checkbook may help keep you out of debt, but it won't change your life, says Jean Cheney, who directs the Venture program. But to read Socrates, she says, is to connect yourself to someone who lived 3,000 years ago and then to realize I've had those same thoughts. "That's enormously important for people who feel marginalized," she says.

In Portland, Ore., the Humanity in Perspective program (known as HIP) is in its fifth year. When they were first starting the course, says Christopher Zinn, executive director of the Oregon Council for the Humanities, his staff talked to social service agencies to help find eligible students and were always met with the same skepticism. "Why are you asking us this?" the agencies wanted to know. "These are people with not enough to eat, not enough medications." What has evolved, Zinn says, is a five-year civic conversation about the various ways a person can be poor.

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In mid-November, two months into Utah's Venture program, the 20 students sit in a darkened classroom at Horizonte, the alternative high school where the class meets two evenings a week. Tonight a picture flashes on the pull-down screen: Bernini's massive, ornate St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. In her day job, Jennifer Bauman teaches art history at the University of Utah, to students who mostly are too cool to express their amazement at baroque architecture. But in the Venture class the students exclaim: "Ooooooh."