On the campus of Brown University in a program called ArtsLit, a teacher named Kurt Wootton is using reading and performance of classic texts to teach literacy to local teenagers from struggling schools. “Like immigrants of earlier generations – the Italian stonecutter tuning his radio to opera, the Irish stevedore reciting Yeats in a tavern, the Jewish tailor viewing a Yiddish production of ‘King Lear’ – Mr. Wootton sees high culture not as the oppressor of the lowly but as an agent of their liberation.”