Clemente would be so proud

Robert is 53, an electrician by trade. He made some bad decisions along life's highway. Mostly drugs and alcohol. "Living haphazardly," he calls it.

Carrie is 41, the mother of a 4-year-old. She has two jobs but wants to use her brain instead of working so hard. "Somehow, 20 years of my life just flew by," she said.

Chad's 32, been in the Navy, but worked mostly in food and beverage. Says when he drinks he "breaks out in handcuffs."

Douglas sleeps on a friend's back porch for now. Crack cocaine and powder, he says, led to no money, no home. He's a month shy of three years straight.

Mark is 49 and has five kids. His hands are covered with paint from his day job. His goal was to finish college before his oldest child. Now he's trying to beat his youngest out of school.

They are just a cross section of Mary Ann Kohli's Thursday night class where they are discussing Plato, Aristotle, Kant and Mill.

If that sounds unrealistic, remember, they're all graduates from the school of hard knocks.

Lost traction

Kohli teaches at Trident Tech's Palmer Campus on Columbus Street on the East Side of Charleston.

She recruits her students from homeless shelters, drug and alcohol programs and the Star Gospel Mission. Others were referred by former students. All are looking for another chance.

Thursday night they sat in a classroom, eating fried chicken and corn on the cob, discussing Immanuel Kant's theory of categorical imperative.

Kohli and her assistant, Katharine Purcell, started the Clemente Course four years ago, modeled after a program in New York. It's named for the former baseball great Roberto Clemente, a slugger for the Pittsburgh Pirates whose heart was even bigger than his bat. He died in a plane crash in 1972 while delivering aid to earthquake victims in Nicaragua.

Kohli and Purcell provide each student with a meal, bus fare and a book to help make it through a semester studying philosophy and reading the classics.

"You would be surprised how knowledgeable they are," said Kohli, who like Purcell, has a doctorate and teaches a full load at Trident in addition to this class two nights a week. "But they've had some crisis in their life and lost traction."

Life and death

This class started with 27 students and still has 23 at midterm, much better than the program's 50-percent national attrition rate.

"This is an exceptional class," Kohli brags. "One night we had a fire drill and they all took their exams outside, sat on the curb and continued to write. That would never happen in a regular class."

This is no regular class. One semester a student committed suicide. Another died from unknown causes. "Some of our people are on the edge of life and death," Kohli said.

It costs $20,000 a year to keep this program going. It is the only one of its kind in South Carolina. Money comes from putting on plays and the kindness of strangers.

"It has made my life a whole lot richer," said Kohli, who started the project after a bout with cancer. "Clemente may seem counterintuitive, but it works. Courses that people thought were beyond their abilities are teaching them how to move beyond their limitations."

Reach Ken Burger at kburger@postandcourier.com or 937-5598. To read previous columns, go to Charleston.net/burger.