(FORTUNE Magazine) – In the fall of 1993, an unusual group of youngsters will enter kindergarten at Beethoven Elementary School on Chicago's South Side. They will come, as most South Side kids do, from wretched urban poverty: The Beethoven school serves children from six of the 28 tenements of the Robert Taylor Homes, the country's largest public housing project. They will have spent their formative years in an environment heavy with hunger, drug addiction, and violence. Yet if a startling experiment known as the Beethoven project is successful, these progeny of the hard-core underclass will start school as well developed and ready to learn as Dick and Jane. The Beethoven project -- formally called the Center for Successful Childhood Development -- was inspired by Irving Harris, a Chicago philanthropist who has spent $1 million on the experiment. (Harris, 77, made his fortune developing home-permanent products for Toni Co. and now runs Standard Shares, a holding company.) His idea is intriguing: He wants to identify all the approximately 125 children who will enter Beethoven Elementary in 1993 -- some of whom have not even been born yet -- and provide them and their mothers with special services over the next five years. Mothers will receive prenatal care, counseling, and classes in parenting. Children will get pediatric care and be enrolled in preschool. To find participants, nine family advocates from the community roam the dingy corridors, knocking on doors. Women who are pregnant or who have recently delivered babies -- 120 as of May -- are asked to join. The typical mother is black, single, and 20 years old, and has at least two other children. Gaining the trust of the Robert Taylor residents has not been easy. To show its commitment, the center's 43-member staff -- mostly social workers -- took over the second floor of one of the housing project's 16-story buildings. Gang wars and frequent gunfire did not deter them from moving in last fall; faulty plumbing almost did. ''There were no toilets. The place was bombed out,'' says Harris. ''By herculean effort we got it renovated.'' The center quickly became a haven for parents and children. One couple, concerned that their toddler was not toddling, brought the child in to see a specialist, who pinpointed the reason: The parents carried their baby everywhere because the floor of their apartment was covered with rat poison. Among those closely tracking the progress of Beethoven's kindergarten class of 1993 will be Senator Edward Kennedy, a longtime Harris pal. Kennedy sponsored the Comprehensive Child Development Centers Act, which was signed into law in April. The legislation authorizes funding for programs modeled after the Beethoven project in up to 25 other cities. The Beethoven experiment is aimed at the poorest of the poor, a group that comprises only about 2% of the population. Is it worth spending so much time and money on such a small number of people? ''If we don't do something with these five million people,'' says Harris, ''they will grow to ten million. Can we afford not to do it?''