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The Highlander Folk School:An Education for Life
Jillian Stein
HIGHLANDER FOLK SCHOOL: AN EDUCATION FOR LIFE 2
I was first introduced to the Highlander Folk School last spring by a
philosophy professor at the University of Minnesota named John Wallace. John was
one of the founders of a one-month residential course, titled Lives Worth Living, held
in Southwestern Minnesota each May session. Multiple acquaintances at the
University had been trying to convince me to attend, and I was seriously considering
it. I had entered that fall as a Masters of Science student in the College of Food,
Agricultural, and Natural Resource Sciences, with a focus in sustainable tourism,
parks and public land management, and environmental education. While I had been
gaining a great deal of expertise in the practical, business, and scientific facets of the
field(s), I felt lacking in the human dimensions of what drew me to the protection of
natural lands in the first place. I wanted to deepen my understanding of why the
natural resources were so critical to the physical, emotional, and spiritual survival of
humanity, and how they were an integral part of what makes a human being whole.
I found CFANS to be competitive, research and publication focused, and lacking
almost entirely in any sense of community. Not sure what I had gotten myself into, I
registered for the Everyday Lives of Youth class in the Youth Development
Leadership program. This decision opened up a new world for me, sending me on a
journey of academic and personal discovery of what it means to be an advocate for
change and how to stay present to the fundamental truths of what does make a life
worth living. That spring, Professor Wallace had given me a copy of The Long Haul,
the autobiography of Highlander Folk School founder Myles Horton. I was
immediately enamored with his grassroots approach to democracy, education, and
social change. I did spend the month in Southwestern Minnesota with the Lives
HIGHLANDER FOLK SCHOOL: AN EDUCATION FOR LIFE 3
Worth Living course, and there I learned more about the legacy of the Danish Folk
Schools and Myles Horton and his Highlander Folk School, as well as how to live and
learn in an intentional community. I was called back to the sacredness of learning,
and the potential for education to look into the past and gaze into the future, while
simultaneously staying present in this moment’s lived experience.
When first introduced to the University of Minnesota’s Social Welfare
archives at the Elmer Anderson library this semester, I was overwhelmed with
(geeky) delight. History comes alive! I felt as though I stepped through a time portal
and could place myself in the shoes of the people who had once worked at these
organizations. Rather than the tight and neat summaries I was used to reading on an
organization’s history, I could see the inter-office papers, the pictures, the
participant stories, and the publications that painted a far more colorful and
authentic picture of the highs and lows of a program’s mission and events. These
archives made the history real, and reminded me that places like the legendary
Henry Street or Hull House settlement houses were carried on the shoulders of
actual people with trials and limitations like the rest of us. Due to my personal
interest, I inquired to the librarian if there were any archives concerning the
Highlander Folk School, and was delighted to find out that Ralph Tefferteller, the
settlement house supporter who brought folk dancing to Highlander, had his
extensive collection of correspondences and papers at the Anderson library. I also
discovered that the University of Wisconsin had an enormous amount of Highlander
material in their Radical Movements archives. I happened to be passing through
Madison, and took the opportunity to investigate the folk school that I had become
HIGHLANDER FOLK SCHOOL: AN EDUCATION FOR LIFE 4
so interested in. My subsequent research deepened my admiration for what Myles
Horton and his colleagues accomplished at Highlander and helped enrich my
understanding of the origins of the school, their fundamental approach to education,
and the logistical inputs and activities that Highlander programs engaged in to
secure their intended short-term outputs and long-term outcomes. I came with
questions on what made Highlander “Highlander,” wanting to discover how it
became so influential in two of the biggest social movements of the 20th century.
How does a relatively short experience in an isolated retreat-type center in the
Tennessee mountainside translate into major social change across the South,
specifically in the union organizing and civil rights movements? Why were the
influences of folk song and dance so critical to the success of their programs? The
remainder of this paper aims to demonstrate that Highlander, like my experience at
the Lives Worth Living course, gave people an opportunity to reclaim the sacredness
in learning from their own experiences, as well as from other people both alike and
vastly different from themselves. Highlander was an anomaly of its time and place,
as well as a tangible manifestation of space; a practice in real democracy for people
who were historically oppressed, disenfranchised, and told their experiences were
without value. Leadership was at the core of Highlander’s mission, and the school
addressed the task of empowering leaders through a holistic appreciation of the
mind, body, and spirit. Even though the Highlander Folk School focused its
programming on adult education, the field of youth development has a great deal of
worth to extract from its methods and attitudes towards creating agents of chance
and giving voice to the voiceless.
HIGHLANDER FOLK SCHOOL: AN EDUCATION FOR LIFE 5
The Origins of Highlander
“Highlander Folk School,” said John Dewey, “is one of the most important
social educational projects in America today” (Horton, Highlander Folk School,
1949). What made it so, and how did it get that way? In The Long Haul, Myles Horton
describes his own childhood in rural Appalachia, growing up with next to no money
but learning early on from his family that the value of education was not material
wealth, but to help your fellow man. These lessons of humility and cooperative
living stayed with Horton as he left the South to pursue higher education in New
York City. At the Union Theological Seminary, Horton’s pragmatic belief that
learning lived outside the walls of the classroom paired with his idealistic faith that
people will fight for what they believe in given the skills and opportunity, resonated
with certain classmates looking for a democratic answer to the cooperative truths
they saw in socialism. What did something like this look like, though? Horton found
the missing link to his theory of education when he discovered what the Danish
were doing at their folk, or “peoples” schools. The Danish folk schools, originated by
a clergyman named N.F.S. Grundtvig in the 19th century, were designed to provide a
residential experience of a couple months to a year, usually in a rural group setting,
where the “common folk” of the country had the opportunity to investigate large
life-shaping questions about the meanings and manifestations of human existence,
but within the contexts of personal experience rather than elitist academic theories.
Grundtvig believed this new kind of ‘education for life’ would awaken the masses’
consciousness of what constitutes a full life and how to participate in the
conversation and struggle to achieve it for all of society. Thus the final seed for the
HIGHLANDER FOLK SCHOOL: AN EDUCATION FOR LIFE 6
Highlander Folk School was planted, with the folk schools an example of what a
learning institution that did not act like an academic institution could look like.
Horton’s visit to Denmark in 1931 helped him to imagine a similar folk school
movement in America, with roots he already saw planted in the residential and
democratic setting of the urban settlement houses in the North that he visited
before going to Denmark. While in Denmark, Horton had made a list of the following
traits that he wanted to incorporate into his school.
Students and teachers living together Peer learning Group Singing Beautiful Scenery Freedom from state regulation Nonvocational education Freedom from examinations Social interaction in a nonformal setting A highly motivating purpose Clarity in what the school stood for and what it stood against
(Myles Horton, 1998)
Horton began planning a rural settlement house in the South, where onsite
experiences could become part of a lifelong transformative process for the
traditionally disenfranchised. There, they would be able to address their individual
and greater societal limitations, come up with their own agendas and answers to
their problems, all the while engaging in life-affirming activities like art and singing
and dancing that brought to life the history of their people and instilled the feelings
of community and camaraderie.
The Highlander Folk School came into being in 1932, when Myles Horton and
Don West received a building and some land from Dr. Lillian W. Johnson, a Southern
liberal physician familiar to the lived reality of most folks in the area and
HIGHLANDER FOLK SCHOOL: AN EDUCATION FOR LIFE 7
sympathetic to the two men’s cause. Horton and West had secured a venerable
advisory committee for the school, including Reinhold Niebuhr, George S. Counts,
Norman Thomas, Mary Van Kleek and others, and now found themselves in
Monteagle, TN with a large farm house and the idea to “train Southern rural and
industrial leaders for participation in a democratic society (Horton, The Highlander
Folk School, 1936). How they would go about that Herculean task was unknown.
Horton reminisced in the magazine The Social Frontier how it was two months
before they had any students. Their first class began following a conversation that a
Highlander staff member had with a farmer and his wife about psychology. They
wanted to continue the discussion, so they all agreed to meet at the school the
following evening. Soon there was a group of over twenty-five local residents,
including farmers, miners, unemployed, college graduates, and one minister,
ranging from age 18 to 80. Every class and class discussion at Highlander grew out
of the participants’ own experiences. A class on cultural geography began with some
community members’ interest in some snapshots a neighbor brought back from
Europe. A class in economics stemmed from the stories that local teachers had told
about a miner’s strike in Wilder, Tennessee. Another course grew out of the
discussions students were having concerning the recent presidential election.
Students paid the school in small exchanges of monies, goods, and services,
providing what they could spare to the institution. Students attending the
Highlander classes began to organize and lead their own events as well, fulfilling a
major piece of the living democracy that Horton had hoped to instill at the school. A
young woman who played the piano started a music club that became so popular
HIGHLANDER FOLK SCHOOL: AN EDUCATION FOR LIFE 8
that it was permanently integrated into the school curriculum. Another student
organized a dramatics club, and members produced plays about local situations and
performed them for the whole community (Myles Horton, 1998). Out of this first
year, Highlander was able to hone in on its approach to programming, an approach
that would continue to guide the school as it would become more and more
wrapped up in the larger social movements of the day. The Highlander program was
made of three components: residential short courses lasting 1-6 weeks and
weekend workshops, extension work and special education projects, and local
community activities and outreach. Combined, this programmatic approach allowed
Highlander to stay rooted within its surrounding community as well as reach out to
outside individuals, communities, and organizations that could benefit from the
services Highlander had to offer.
Programs: Residential Courses and Weekend Workshops
Farm, industrial, community, religious, and civic workers who showed
promise of becoming local leaders and organizers in their own communities came to
the school to attend the residential short courses or workshops. Recruiting was
done largely by word of mouth, as well as through Highlander staff who referred
people to the school while out doing extension work. Horton was adamant in his
belief that Highlander would be the most effective towards changing society if it
worked with a small group of motivated people. His goal was not to reform mass
education, but rather to reach the masses through working with the kinds of
community members who had the capacity to multiply their experience at
Highlander back at home. He referred to this concept of education as “yeasty,” since
HIGHLANDER FOLK SCHOOL: AN EDUCATION FOR LIFE 9
it would continue to expand and populate through the effective leadership of its
residential students (Horton, The Adventures of a Radical Hillbilly, 1981).
All the residential courses and workshops were interracial, as was the
Highlander staff, which was something that no other institution in the South could
claim at the time. In addition to solving the specific practical problems in each
participant’s community, then, Highlander was also setting an example of how non-
segregated programs could give the students a broader general knowledge and
understanding of the society they lived in (Horton, Highlander Folk School Purpose
& Program). Programs were run throughout each year on citizenship, health, rural-
urban relations and labor-management relations, international problems, the use of
visual materials, creative writing, and recreation. Each program would take shape in
its own natural way, though, as students were expected to create their own learning
goals and objectives for the course. The Highlander staff had little to do with the
direction the program took, but served more of a facilitator role and a sounding
board in which students could bounce ideas off of. This was a lesson that Horton and
his colleagues had learned early at Highlander. Horton expressed in The Long Haul
that one of the biggest stumbling blocks that the Highlander staff had was their
academic backgrounds. They wanted to reach in their ‘bag of tricks’ and give the
students the magic bullet for their problems. Horton said that they ended up doing
what most people do when they come to a place like Appalachia; “we saw problems
that we thought we had the answers to, rather than seeing the problems and the
answers the people had themselves” (Myles Horton, 1998). Horton and staff could
appreciate that they didn’t have to have the answers to the problems, and that truth
HIGHLANDER FOLK SCHOOL: AN EDUCATION FOR LIFE 10
provided a newfound sense of freedom in pursuing new ways of doing things, most
importantly in allowing each student to form the answers to their own questions.
They also realized the significance of knowing the lived experience of the people
they were serving. As Myles Horton shares in The Long Haul,
“We also found out that our talk about brotherhood and democracy and shared experiences was irrelevant to people in Grundy County in 1932. They were hungry. Their problems had to do with how to get some food in their bellies and how to get a doctor. We weren’t equipped at all to deal with those problems, so we took a good look at ourselves and said, “What are we going to do? We’re going to have to learn how people learn, and respect what they already know.” That’s when we finally understood that as long as we kept on learning, we could share that learning. When we stopped learning ourselves, then we could no longer help anyone.” (Myles Horton, 1998)
This revelation for the need of reciprocity in education helped Highlander to
become a champion of experiential learning processes, taking a phenomenological
approach towards the participants of their courses and offering the students real
experience in what they wished to learn. Highlander aimed to embody the values it
was trying to teach, a “practice what you preach” mentality that resonated with
Horton’s childhood concepts that education was meant to contribute to the greater
good. They believed in a democratic society, so their model of education had to be
democratic. They believed in a cooperative society, so they would give students the
opportunity to organize a cooperative. If the students were interested in leading a
union, they would let them run the school so they could know what it felt like to run
something (Myles Horton, 1998). A typical workshop might have centered on a
theme such as Desegregating Public Schools, for example. Participants would
describe their own personal experiences on the topic and then they would
collectively isolate the important common threads in which to focus on. Highlander
HIGHLANDER FOLK SCHOOL: AN EDUCATION FOR LIFE 11
helped utilize various different mediums in which to aid this process—music,
movies, tape recordings, and role-playing were a few of the methods used. The
group would decide what needed to be done for each issue, and together they would
design an action plan for each person’s community. Throughout this process,
community-building activities like group meals, singing, and dancing would be built
into the experience to nurture the growth of the spiritual and emotional sides of the
students. The result of the residential programs was a holistic awakening to each
student’s life potential, a plan of action to address the problems at home, and a
newfound sense of community and understanding between people from diverse
walks of life.
Programs: Extension Work
The extension work done at Highlander was created to reach men, women,
and young people from unions or organizations who were unable to attend the
residential sessions. Held in industrial and rural communities throughout the South,
these programs helped to secure the school’s foothold as an advocate for social
change. The representatives from Highlander were staff and participants of
previous programs who facilitated the same kinds of experiences that were used at
the residential sessions, but also took a more systematic approach in addressing the
community’s immediate problems. They lent their assistance to workers in
organizational campaigns and in strikes, using their charisma and passion to teach
the people protest songs and strike techniques. They picked up new methods and
stories of resistance from these communities, too, and reported back to the
Highlander headquarters to keep the school in the beating heart of the movements.
HIGHLANDER FOLK SCHOOL: AN EDUCATION FOR LIFE 12
The extension work was Highlander’s way of living outside of its institutional walls,
breathing new life and purpose into its mission of liberation education, and building
upon its successes by spreading the word of social revolution in the South.
Programs: Rural Community Center
Fulfilling Myles Horton’s idea of being a rural settlement house, Highlander
provided programs and resources to its local community of Monteagle, TN and the
surrounding area. This was a key element to the sense of place and belonging that
Highlander deemed a necessary part of any person and institution’s existence. A
nursery school founded by community member Claudia Lewis was a core part of the
community outreach program. The parents of children that attended the school
cooperatively ran a hot lunch program, which grew into a hot lunch program for
grade school children as well (Horton, Highlander Folk School Purpose & Program).
There was a young peoples’ recreation group, piano lessons for anyone in the
community, various drama clubs, swimming lessons, arts and crafts classes, home
canning classes, regular folk dancing events, a community library and a bookmobile
program, a weekly local paper, a sewing cooperative, and special lectures that were
given at night so workers who could not attend the morning residential sessions
could attend (Horton, The Highlander Folk School, 1936). Highlander utilized the
rich human resources it had in its own backyard, bringing in local musicians and
artisans to collaborate with visiting students, and felt compelled to use the school as
a way to provide continuity between generations and keep mountain culture
thriving. Highlander was intentionally founded in an area of great natural beauty,
and the school founders imagined that outsiders who came to Highlander and fell in
HIGHLANDER FOLK SCHOOL: AN EDUCATION FOR LIFE 13
love with the land and people might help to shatter stereotypes about Appalachia.
This would perhaps help the local people to gain a greater sense of pride and
confidence in their community and begin to see themselves within an asset-based
paradigm rather than the deficit-based one that so regularly gets placed on poor
areas.
The Role of Folk Song and Dance in Highlander Programs
The cultural aspects to Highlander’s programs became a critical part to their
approach and their successes in the labor and civil rights movements. From the
beginning, the founders of Highlander thought that cultural activities should be
included in all their programs, because people needed more than just intellectual
discussions and calls to action, they also needed activities that cultivated the spirit.
Horton had observed how the Danish folk schools succeeded at revitalizing native
Danish culture by emphasizing storytelling, music, and poetry and the inherent
revolutionary spark those forms of communicating created. Highlander staff knew
from experience that groups would open up and develop quicker and stronger
bonds of trust and solidarity if they engaged in cultural activities like group singing
and folk dancing. The use of cultural elements like singing, song-writing, and group
dancing was therefore seen as both a tangible method for organizing people, the
same way book reading or discussions were, and were also a way of engaging in the
life-affirming activities that were a part of an ‘education for life’ that one received at
a folk school. Using music for political purposes at Highlander was done through
communal performances at workshops and political demonstrations, concerts by
professional musicians such as Pete Seeger and Woodie Guthrie, and through the
HIGHLANDER FOLK SCHOOL: AN EDUCATION FOR LIFE 14
transcribing of folk song lyrics. Highlander students were encouraged to write songs
and add or change lyrics to existing ballads to better reflect their own situations.
The Highlander songbooks were published each year, and remain a rich source of
expression about people’s daily lives and their desires for social justice. Highlander
staff such as Guy and Candie Carawan and Myles Horton’s wife, Zilphia Johnson
Horton, played key roles in expanding the use of cultural expression at the school.
As Guy Carawan, who became Highlander’s musical director, articulated:
“Highlander’s interests in cultural expressions are twofold. We have learned that music (particularly singing), stories, poems, writing, and theatre can play a crucial supportive role in social movements or in efforts to deal with community issues and problems. Furthermore, people’s indigenous cultural expression is something of value in itself—part of any community’s heritage which can give strength, a sense of identity, and confidence” (Carawan).
Using songs and singing to inspire collective action strikes me as a distinctly
democratic method of organizing people who functioned mostly outside the
boundaries of formal education, who perhaps were not literate and could not
participate in discussions that existed on the page. These songs used oral tradition
to tell the peoples’ stories of struggle, and through the act of singing, the
participants became engaged and emotionally part of the experience. There was not
the option of staying detached, as one can do when reading words on paper. Zilphia
Horton was passionately committed to the power of song as a form of collective
expression and solidarity, as well as an art form in need of preserving. She
pioneered initiatives at Highlander to bring in older local musicians to play with
new young singer/songwriters to provide continuity between the generations, and
musicians coming to visit from the North used the songs of the South to spread the
news of the movement in Northern cities and college campuses. She vigorously
HIGHLANDER FOLK SCHOOL: AN EDUCATION FOR LIFE 15
researched religious hymnals, mountain folk tunes, American labor songs,
international songs of political struggle, and Southern Black spirituals to
reintroduce to the public in fresh and relevant ways (McCurdy, 2005). Highlander
staff sent to do extension work found that knowing familiar songs of the area was a
tremendous asset in building relationships with the people. Zilphia is credited with
bringing such iconic songs as “We Shall Overcome” into the public consciousness as
a symbol for peace and change, and this song has been used to mark the transition
of Highlander as an institution that focused on labor organizing to one focused on
the civil rights movement. In reality, Highlander remained the same school at its
core; it was simply following its mission of educating people to take more control of
their own lives and addressing the pressing social issues of the day. As Myles Horton
put it, “And although the subject matter differs, the purpose is the same. We use the
same methods…and the same purpose—the purpose is to help people become so
empowered that they can begin to have something to do with their lives” (Horton,
The Adventures of a Radical Hillbilly, 1981). As Highlander became a key presence
in the civil rights movement, hosting Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Septima
Clark, and many other influential people at its workshops and residential courses,
music became an even greater influence in their programmatic approach. Oral
tradition and song were a historically important form of communication for African
Americans, and the singing of these traditional religious songs, slave songs, old
ballads and folk tales, along with newer popular music, brought an emotional charge
to the movement and helped to bridge the experiences of older Blacks not far
removed from the days of slavery and younger Blacks born into the throws of Jim
HIGHLANDER FOLK SCHOOL: AN EDUCATION FOR LIFE 16
Crow laws and KKK violence. It was a different way to tell about what was
important, wrong and hurtful, right, humorous or joyful in their own lives at the
moment (Carawan). This sentiment resonated to the core of the Highlander
philosophy that people can solve their own problems. Given sufficient information
and time to think in a concentrated way about the problems they face, they will
usually come up with their own best answers (Carawan). The same is true with
culture. Culture is grassroots; it starts and grows out of the people and their
experiences. When these experiences are translated into mediums like song, their
authenticity is palpable and, like “We Shall Overcome,” much of the music that
evolved at or through Highlander is heard throughout the world when people are
trying to change the ways things are to the way they are supposed to be (Carawan).
Reflections
The Highlander Folk School is one of the most significant American examples
of what kinds of institutions arise when people in a country are being oppressed.
The Highlander Folk School is now called the Highlander Research and Education
Center, but their mission remains the same. Current programs at Highlander
address issues of immigration and cross-cultural leadership training, as well as
youth organizing and justice camps. Highlander’s methods of awakening the mind,
body, and spirit to light the fire for social change are well worth investigating for
adoption by current social programs. I see many critical elements that need to be
present in any organizational framework; I see reciprocity, experiential and
nonformal learning, leadership development, fun, physicality, respect for lived
experience, and the use of arts and culture to provide a sense of community and
HIGHLANDER FOLK SCHOOL: AN EDUCATION FOR LIFE 17
history. Looking into the Highlander archives helped me remember that unless we
know where we have been, we cannot know where we are going. As I move forward
in my own life and become involved in this generation’s battles for social change, I
will have Highlander as one of my models for the transformative power of education
—an education for life.
HIGHLANDER FOLK SCHOOL: AN EDUCATION FOR LIFE 18
Works CitedCarawan, C. a. Highlander Center: An Approach to Culture and Social Change. Flying Fish Records.Clark, M. H. (1958). The Human Frontier in the Southern Mountains. Journal of Human Relations .Horton, M. (1949). Highlander Folk School. The New World Commentator .Horton, M. Highlander Folk School Purpose & Program. Highlander Folk School.Horton, M. (1959). Some Thoughts on Residential Adult Education. Horton, M. (1981). The Adventures of a Radical Hillbilly. (B. Moyers, Interviewer)Horton, M. (1936, January). The Highlander Folk School. The Social Frontier .McCurdy, J. S.-P. (2005). Employing Music in the Cause of Social Justice: Ruth Crawford Seeger and Zilphia Horton. Voices: The Journal of New York Forklore .Meyer, A. P. (1951). The Development of Education in the Twentieth Century. New York: Prentice-Hall, Inc.Morrow, S. S. (1953). He Does Something About His Convictions! The Message Magazine , 13-15.Myles Horton, w. H. (1998). The Long Haul. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.University of Wisconsin Extension. (2002). Enhancing Program Performance with Logic Models. Retrieved 2010, from UW Extension: www.uwex.edu