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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


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


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.


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 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


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


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


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


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


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.


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


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


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


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


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


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.


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

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