How did this come to be? What were the conditions, struggles, and contingencies that produced the current arrangement?
See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.
This school did not invent itself. It stands in a long line of people who built their own places to learn when the official ones would not have them or would not tell them the truth: the Danish folk high schools, the Highlander Folk School that helped train the civil rights movement, the Citizenship Schools that taught Black adults to read and to vote, the Mississippi Freedom Schools, and the settlement houses. This lens recovers that lineage, so the room knows whose tradition it is joining.
Anchor questions
- Where does the idea of the “folk school” come from, and what was it for?
- What was Highlander, and how did it help train a movement?
- What were the Freedom Schools, and what did they teach that regular schools would not?
- Whose education has been fought for, and whose has been denied, and by whom?
- How have movements built their own schools when the official ones failed them?
Materials
Free unless marked otherwise. “Free to borrow” means a free Internet Archive account and a renewable one-hour loan.
The folk-school and popular-education tradition
- Mark K. Smith, N.F.S. Grundtvig, folk high schools and popular education (infed, 1999, updated 2011). An accessible account of the Danish folk high school idea, Grundtvig’s “living word,” and education rooted in the life of ordinary rural people, the tradition Myles Horton later drew on. Free: infed.org
- Highlander Research and Education Center, About Us. The school’s own account of its founding in 1932, its labor and civil rights history, and its popular-education method. The living institution this project descends from. Free: highlandercenter.org
- Myles Horton (1905 to 1990), The Long Haul: An Autobiography (1990). Horton’s own telling of how he built Highlander and developed what became known as popular education, set against sixty years of Southern social movements. Free to borrow: archive.org
Freedom Schools and Citizenship Schools
- Septima Clark (1898 to 1987), Ready from Within (1986). A first-person narrative of the Citizenship Schools Clark built through Highlander, where Black adults learned to read and to claim the vote. A corrective to male-centered movement histories, and a bridge to Race and Racial Capitalism. Free to borrow: archive.org
- Freedom Schools (SNCC Digital Gateway). A documented history of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Schools and their debt to the Highlander philosophy of people as active agents of their own liberation, curated by SNCC veterans with curriculum documents and student writing. Free: snccdigital.org
The settlement house roots
- Mark K. Smith, Jane Addams and informal education (infed). An overview of Addams, Hull House, and the settlement idea of education as the foundation for democracy, useful background for the workers’ education and social settlement roots of this theme. Free: infed.org
Films and video
- Freedom Summer (Stanley Nelson, PBS American Experience, 2014, 113 min). Chronicles the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project, including the Freedom Schools, showing organizing and popular education under real threat. Streams free on PBS: pbs.org
- “Myles Horton: Radical Hillbilly” (2015). Roughly 30 minutes, about 53,000 views. Interview footage of the Highlander founder on education for social change, in his own voice. A short way to hear the tradition speak for itself. youtube.com/watch?v=qSwW0zc-QBQ
Status
First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Contributions welcome, especially histories of popular education outside the United States, of Indigenous and immigrant community education, and of workers’ schools and labor colleges.