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The Prometheus Project
Updates about
the Prometheus Project will be provided soon. Please e-mail Dean
Dan Dutkofski, Department of Fine Arts, Valencia Community College/West
Campus, at
ddutkofski@valenciacc.edu re: questions about the project and/or
its future.
What is the
Clemente Project?
In the early 1990's, on the Lower East Side
of Manhattan in New York City, Earl Shorris began an experiment in
education. Based on the advice of Viniece Walker, an inmate at
Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison for women
located in a Westchester suburb 50 miles north of New York City, he
decided that to train the poor without a practical education to support
them would have been like constructing a house of cards. Viniece suggested
that education called for the rescue of the long-term poor from their
situation by exposing them to what she called "the moral life of
downtown," a life of concerts, lectures, museums, libraries...and the
humanities. The radical nature of the humanities, with its emphasis
on art, literature, philosophy, and the politics of freedom, may play a
functional role in this regard. It may even create a context out of which
poor and homeless individuals may be able to
recreate themselves and eventually transcend the pain of poverty
and homelessness.
Read more...
How did Valencia
become involved in the Clemente Project?
Last May, Professor John Scolaro was on his way to Valencia Community
College's West Campus, where he teaches Humanities, when he heard Earl
Shorris, author of Riches for the Poor
(1997/2000), interviewed on
National Public Radio. Professor Scolaro was so positively impacted by
what he heard that he was prompted to further investigate the project and
work toward its future implementation under the umbrella of Valencia
Community College.
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