Myles Horton (1905–1990) was an American educator and activist who co-founded the Highlander Folk School (now Highlander Research and Education Center) in Tennessee in 1932 with Don West. Highlander became a central institution in the American popular education tradition and a training ground for civil rights organizers.
Core ideas
- Education from experience: Horton insisted that education begin with the participants’ own experience and knowledge, not with expert instruction. The facilitator’s role is to help people analyze their own situations and develop their own solutions. This aligns with Paulo Freire’s dialogic education, and the two collaborated on a published dialogue, We Make the Road by Walking (1990) [@horton_WeMakeRoad_1990].
- Education for action: Learning at Highlander was directed toward collective action — labor organizing, desegregation, voter registration, community organizing. Education that does not equip people to change their conditions is incomplete.
- Integrated education as practice: Highlander operated as a racially integrated space in the Jim Crow South. This was prefigurative — the school embodied the social relations it sought to create.
Notable works
- The Long Haul: An Autobiography (1998)
- We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change (1990, with Paulo Freire)
Related
- popular education — the tradition Highlander exemplifies
- Septima Clark — developed the citizenship school model through Highlander
- freedom school — a related institution in the Black radical tradition
- conscientization — the critical awareness Highlander’s pedagogy aimed to develop