On a recent Monday morning, 15 bleary-eyed high school seniors in Phoenix, Arizona, shuffled into English class, sat at tables that were arranged in a circle, put away their enormous water bottles, and settled down for the day’s lesson. Their teacher, a young man in a brown corduroy blazer, dispensed with housekeeping—the readings to do, the papers to write—and then he closed the tome in front of him, a paperback edition of the Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. “Who is more honest,” he asked the class, “Miusov or Fyodor?”
There was silence while the students leafed through their books. One girl ventured that it was probably the wealthy patriarch Fyodor. Reading aloud a few lines, she said they showed that his cousin, another wealthy landowner named Miusov, who loathes Fyodor, withheld his own…