Modern Education: a parable

Once upon a time in the land of Norwalk, I taught English at Cerritos College.  Why Cerritos College is in Norwalk, and not in Cerritos I could never figure out.  But there it is.  Wiser people than me probably had a reason, so I'll leave it alone.
  
There was a man of about twenty-eight years old who sat in the back of the room.  He had two tears tattooed just below the right-hand corner of his right eye.  This man never said a word, but he would look at me directly.  By "directly" I mean to say he stared at me hard, prison hard, looking for the slightest trace of B.S., so that he could confirm what he already thought and then split back to the street a Justified man.
  
Things went that way for 14 weeks, and then I assigned the first 110 pages of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

In spite of what you may have learned in grade school, Huck Finn is not a kids' book.  It is without a doubt "The Great American Novel."  A few authors have come close: Faulkner, James Agee, Flannery O'Connor, Fitzgerald, a few others, but no one has written a better, a more American book.
 
Never having taught Huck Finn in Norwalk at Cerritos College, I started class with the question, "What did you guys think of Huck Finn so far?"  Usually when a college professor asks a question and it's impossible to figure out the answer he wants, there is a dreadful silence that follows. That is because our educational system turns students into trained seals. Thus, usually, there is this dreadful silence that extends...however this time a voice I had never heard came from the last row.
 
"I dig Huck, man," Two Tears said.
"Really?  Why is that?"
"The kid is street-smart, man."
"Can you point to some places in the book where you see him being street-smart, please?"

And, so, Two Tears did.  A couple of his examples were well beyond the 110th page. His examples led other students to talk and offer other examples and we all had a swell time that day talking about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and talking about what being street smart meant. Near the end of class I ask them read to another chunk of the novel for next time.

After class Two Tears came up to ask a question.  He waited behind the college students who always come up and ask the questions I had already answered during class. Once the Lost Kids had left, Two Tears approached the desk.  Gone was the prison hard stare.  

"I know you only said to read the 110 pages, but I finished the book.  Is that okay?"
"That's great.  You're ahead of the class.  We'll be writing an essay about this book, so you might want to start thinking about what you might want to say in an essay."
"Yeah, okay.  Listen, man, I never read a book before..."
"You graduated from high school?"
"Man, you didn't need to read a book to graduate from there.  I dug this book.  Are there more like it?"
"Well, there aren't any exactly like this book, but there are a lot of really great books to read."
"Can you give me a list or something?"
"Tell you what.  Just wander around the library reading the titles of books on the shelves.  When a title grabs you, pull the book down and read a bit of it.  If you don't like it, put it back."
"I can do that?"