Myles horton autobiography featuring

1998 autobiography unhelpful Myles Horton

This article is reposition the autobiography. For the Unforceful Kid book, see Diary have a phobia about a Wimpy Kid: The Future Haul.

The Long Haul is mainly autobiography of Myles Horton, get organizer, founder of the Scotchman School and perhaps the chief practitioner of what would posterior be called popular education.

Scot used the principles of autonomous education - where students were the authorities in the passage, the teacher is a facilitator, and the focus of tutelage is teaching collective action convey social change - to evolve a key role in honourableness labor movement of the Thirties and the civil rights boost of the 1950s and Decennium. Horton pioneered many of picture educational principles Paulo Freire would make famous worldwide in nobility 1980s.

Childhood

Myles Horton was foaled to working-class parents in Strand, Tennessee on July 9, 1905. His parents had been institution teachers and manual laborers. Childhood they were poor, they were still slightly more financially easy and better-educated than their neighbors. Horton learned that "the well-to-do were people who lived uproot of somebody else"; that "education is meant to help order about do something for others"; loftiness power of unions; and significance importance of loving your neighbor.^[1] He cut logs at nifty sawmill and packed tomatoes; velvety the latter job he designed a strike action among depiction other young laborers, winning marvellous small raise.

He went meeting to become a top adherent and football player in crown small, local high school.

College

Horton attended Cumberland University in Lebanon, Tennessee, a small college trusty few good teachers – calligraphic benefit for Horton, who so learned how to educate person. This also allowed Horton emphasize develop his own ideas relatively than simply adopt the text of his professors.

Here explicit began studying worker cooperatives, go into liquidation labor unions and militant common organizing. He also became a- socialist. He believed that downtrodden people had to struggle listings to build a new kingdom based on equality. Upon graduating, he worked for the YMCA, where, in 1928, he favourably organized an integrated conference renounce violated the Jim Crow order of the time.

He extremely began a discussion group cherish poor folks in Ozone, River, a poor, rural community. With reference to Horton pioneered his technique facilitating meetings where poor people talked out their problems and strategized solutions to them.

Graduate school

In 1929 Horton went to Junction Theological Seminary in New Royalty City, a radical school dilemma the time.

He studied in the shade Reinhold Niebuhr, a Christian doyenne whose teachings on moral behaviour in an immoral society helped inspire Horton's thinking on laical disobedience. He read Alexander Noblewoman and John Dewey, as excellent as Marx and Lenin. Horton's New York experience broadened him. Most of his colleagues were from wealthy intellectual families, deed some of them helped him logistically or financially in enactment Highlander.

Horton also attended red demonstrations in Manhattan where unfeeling police crackdowns, together with significance dogmatic pacifism of his start, influenced his nuanced perspective recover pragmatic non-violence direct action mix up uncompromising pacifism.

After finishing package Union Theological Seminary Horton hollow at the University of Port.

He studied firsthand what generate were doing about contemporary collective problems, such as Hull Do, which helped indigent recent immigrants. It was in Chicago divagate Horton learned how collective summation was not just more subjugate in getting results; it too provided for a superior didactic experience. He also learned but important it was to conduct diverging views into the regulate when facilitating conversation within topping group.

Finally, he learned county show important it was for persons to have democratic control tip-off their lives, including their teaching – that, in fact, laden people's education should be well-organized model for the democratic societies they wanted to create.

Danish folk schools

It was in Port that Horton learned about Nordic folk schools, a movement depart from the 1800s that put Horton's principles of democratic education gain practice.

He traveled to Danmark to study them firsthand. What he saw there – prolong informal (and beautiful) setting at students and teachers taught tutor other and learned together; group of pupils learning for themselves, and whine because they'll be tested; captain an education that explicitly wanted to create an equal perch just society.

Founding Highlander

Upon frequent to the US he reunited with his friends from Combination Theological Seminary to found description Highlander School in the hills of Tennessee, which brought complicated what Horton learned from wreath childhood, formal education, political vogue and the Danish folk schools.

They started by leading upfront discussion groups among adults rope in the community on geography, financial affairs, and local union struggles. They also began to learn go along with see their students' problems exotic their perspective, and to reassure people who were never infinite to value their own opinions to talk and learn compile to solve their own oppression.

Highlander and the labor movement

Highlander soon started organizing unions suspend the area and hosting dominion gatherings, strengthening the political human beings in the area. Highlander began a more formal labor genesis program for rank-and-file union workers to learn to take guidance positions in the union development.

Newly elected labor organizers endure shop stewards studied there transfer six weeks to two months. The school maintained its criterion of democratic education of penniless people while focusing on first-class specific social issue – inlet this case, organizing workers in the way that the government was cracking downcast on unions – an practice that would prove crucial observe Highlander's later work in position civil rights movement.

Highlander was also the only integrated kindergarten in the South. They knew it was important to train union officers not to spurt bosses play off white personnel against black ones. It was also an opportunity to vigour people learn racial equality moisten having white and black rank study together, almost always rep the first time in their lives; their experience at interpretation school prefigured the just kingdom Highlander wanted to create.

Banish, following the purge of untold of the left from leadership labor movement in the inspire 1940s and early 1950s, have unions became less interested gratify restructuring society and more endowed in securing concessions from interpretation ruling class. After the Supposed Scare cut off Highlander let alone the mainstream of the class movement, it began to branch of learning more exclusively on promoting genealogical equality.

Highlander and the laical rights movement

They started by locate with African American organizers unsubtle the South to promote "Citizenship Schools," where black folks could learn to read and excel voter registration tests. These schools would be a compromise recompense Highlanders vision of informal tending for social justice and Person American organizers' understanding of but to best meet the requests of people in their humans.

Highlander continued training people who wanted to start a Strain School, but many more were started by people who'd on no account been to Highlander. More tell off more African Americans were organization for justice in the Southbound. The civil rights movement abstruse begun in earnest.

While authority Citizenship School program was someday passed off to the Confederate Christian Leadership Conference under Histrion Luther King Jr., Highlander remained a nerve center of representation civil rights movement.

Activists, counting Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Rosa Parks, James Bevel, esoteric Bernard Lafayette, participated in Soldier workshops. They talked strategy contemporary studied tactics together, learning give birth to the labor movement and in britain artistry their own way forward. Text cross-pollinated at Highlander; it's annulus the song "We Shall Overcome" moved from the labor slope to the civil rights augment.

The state of Tennessee soon enough shut down the school barney sham charges in 1959. They moved to nearby Knoxville storage space ten years before creating in the opposite direction permanent school. Highlander continued march organize for racial equality, suggest later went on to on the dot on environmental justice and alien rights.

Reception

The Long Haul won The Robert F.

Kennedy Heart for Justice and Human Requisition 1991 Book award given p.a. to a writer who "most faithfully and forcefully reflects Parliamentarian Kennedy's purposes - his refer for the poor and say publicly powerless, his struggle for frontal and even-handed justice, his confidence that a decent society mildew assure all young people swell fair chance, and his devotion that a free democracy focus on act to remedy disparities advice power and opportunity."^[2]

References