Last week the Center for Ancient Studies held its annual Rose-Marie Lewent Conference on Ancient Studies, "Democracy, Education and the Classics." It took place in the Jurow Lecture Hall, unmistakably Greek with its cylindrical form and Doric columns, lending weight to the discussion, both with its centric design and milieu of antiquity. I had haughtily come to ponder the potential for the classics' return to basic education, but the education in question turned out to be mine.

The first speaker was Earl Shorris, founder of the Clemente Course in the Humanities, a successful and expanding nonprofit program teaching classics and humanities to the poor and troubled, the so-called "underclass." He said he recruits ex-cons, drop- outs and single mothers for the course, teaching the virtues of morality and citizenship through the classics. The entirety of his first class went on to college, and Clemente Courses have sprung up all over the United States, with additional locations in Mexico, Canada, Australia and Argentina.

Subsequent speakers also sung the praise of the Clemente Course and the ability of the classics to teach timeless lessons of ethics, responsibility and community. However, I could not shake Shorris' examples of students who reinforced his belief that humanities are more than just distant lessons of dead white men. He mentioned a woman who would not allow her husband to beat her anymore after she read Immanuel Kant, and a woman who understood Sophocles' "Antigone" better than anyone could, because she had turned in her own daughter to the FBI.

The event ended with a Q-and-A session, with many open-ended questions: Are the classics, with their broad pronouncements, too provocative for widespread educational use in the modern world? Are they perceived as too dense and too dated to be considered relevant in popular thought? Yet the most important question was whether the current political climate was too blunt and polarized to have a place for those preferring a philosophical approach.

The panelists all answered this question in a similar way: that for the good of politics, those with a philosophical mindset should consider themselves as having the most to offer, and that the ability to contemplate is a life skill that everyone should have, regardless of political participation.

Danielle Allen, a University of Chicago professor, answered best by referring to book 10 of Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics," which reads: "And while people hate men who oppose their impulses, even if they oppose them rightly, the law in its ordaining of what is good is not burdensome. Surely he who wants to make men, whether many or few, better by his care must try to become capable of legislating, if it is through laws that we can become good."

I have spent four years engaged with democracy academically and politically, and for two years journalistically. Still, I left the event renewed, realizing that I had only started. By highlighting democracy's ties between antiquity and the present, we realize that the questions of democracy which still remain tell us that the issue will never be resolved. Beyond its basic meaning, democracy has such varied interpretations, applications and goals that it will always be in flux.