Andragogy in the Appalachians: Myles Horton, the Highlander Folk School, and Education for Social and Economic Justice

The Highlander Folk School: Reputation And Legacy

A quest for practical courses for adults to work on solving their social problems was made some 90 years ago when a young man from Tennessee, Myles Horton, decided that he wanted to go into education for adults rather than for children, and that he wanted to build his own special school to promote social justice and economic democracy in the southern part of the Appalachian mountains of Tennessee. He called his school, co-founded with activist Don West, The Highlander Folk School, and, interestingly, he located it on property owned by Dr. Lillian Johnson, a former student of John Dewey. For those of us in adult education, the value of studying this small, unorthodox school is that it helps to understand education and learning partly because “if our judgments about educational change were based only on conventional histories, our vision of alternative futures would be constrained (Adams, 1972, p. 497).

Starting in the early 1930s and continuing even today (with the name Highlander Research and Education Center), the Highlander Folk School has been developing courses for adults in social and economic justice, with themes dealing with the organization of workers, the addressing of civil rights issues, the fight against poverty in the Appalachians, and the resistance to corporate environmental degradation.

As we will see from a review of Highlander's history, Myles Horton was an idealist who remained dedicated to the goal of a “new social order” based on political and social democracy. Like Dewey, he believed strongly that education is one of the instruments for bringing this new social order into being (Thayer-Bacon, 2004).