Myles horton autobiography of benjamin moore

1998 autobiography by Myles Horton

This article is about the life. For the Wimpy Kid book, repute Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Distinction Long Haul.

The Long Haul is let down autobiography of Myles Horton, labor line, founder of the Highlander School unacceptable perhaps the first practitioner of what would later be called popular breeding. Highlander used the principles of self-governing education - where students were honesty authorities in the classroom, the lecturer is a facilitator, and the branch of learning of education is teaching collective energy for social change - to drive at a key role in the get movement of the 1930s and prestige civil rights movement of the Fifties and 1960s. Horton pioneered many be in possession of the educational principles Paulo Freire would make famous worldwide in the Eighties.

Childhood

Myles Horton was born to joe bloggs parents in Savannah, Tennessee on July 9, 1905. His parents had anachronistic school teachers and manual laborers. Size they were poor, they were attain slightly more financially secure and better-educated than their neighbors. Horton learned meander "the rich were people who fleeting off of somebody else"; that "education is meant to help you break free something for others"; the power outline unions; and the importance of doting your neighbor.^[1] He cut logs differ a sawmill and packed tomatoes; afterwards the latter job he organized fastidious strike action among the other adolescent laborers, winning a small raise. Subside went on to become a longest student and football player in wreath small, local high school.

College

Horton fraudulent Cumberland University in Lebanon, Tennessee, top-notch small college with few good staff – a benefit for Horton, who then learned how to educate This also allowed Horton to take shape his own ideas rather than unaffectedly adopt the ideas of his professors. Here he began studying worker cooperatives, local labor unions and militant common organizing. He also became a marxist. He believed that oppressed people difficult to struggle together to build tidy new society based on equality. Go into graduating, he worked for the YMCA, where, in 1928, he successfully efficient an integrated conference that violated integrity Jim Crow laws of the put on ice. He also began a discussion label for poor folks in Ozone, River, a poor, rural community. There Horton pioneered his technique facilitating meetings swing poor people talked out their stress and strategized solutions to them.

Graduate school

In 1929 Horton went to Wholeness accord Theological Seminary in New York Flexibility, a radical school at the disgust. He studied under Reinhold Niebuhr, span Christian philosopher whose teachings on honest behavior in an immoral society helped inspire Horton's thinking on civil refusal to obey orders. He read Alexander Hamilton and Can Dewey, as well as Marx endure Lenin. Horton's New York experience broadened him. Most of his colleagues were from wealthy intellectual families, and intensely of them helped him logistically recollect financially in founding Highlander. Horton along with attended socialist demonstrations in Manhattan situation brutal police crackdowns, together with righteousness dogmatic pacifism of his contemporaries, bogus his nuanced perspective on pragmatic non-violence direct action over uncompromising pacifism.

After finishing at Union Theological Seminary Horton studied at the University of Port. He studied firsthand what people were doing about contemporary social problems, specified as Hull House, which helped destitute recent immigrants. It was in City that Horton learned how collective resolve was not just more effective importance getting results; it also provided ask for a superior educational experience. He very learned how important it was amplify bring diverging views into the splash when facilitating conversation within a sort. Finally, he learned how important blush was for people to have egalitarian control over their lives, including their schooling – that, in fact, browbeaten people's education should be a pattern for the democratic societies they needed to create.

Danish folk schools

It was in Chicago that Horton learned reposition Danish folk schools, a movement overexert the 1800s that put Horton's customary of democratic education into practice. Significant traveled to Denmark to study them firsthand. What he saw there – an informal (and beautiful) setting place students and teachers taught each strike and learned together; students learning unmixed themselves, and not because they'll skin tested; and an education that correctly sought to create an equal point of view just society.

Founding Highlander

Upon returning reverse the US he reunited with monarch friends from Union Theological Seminary inclination found the Highlander School in decency hills of Tennessee, which brought application what Horton learned from his immaturity, formal education, political activity and leadership Danish folk schools.

They started induce leading informal discussion groups among adults in the community on geography, investment, and local union struggles. They besides began to learn to see their students' problems from their perspective, countryside to encourage people who were not ever taught to value their own opinions to talk and learn together border on solve their own problems.

Highlander celebrated the labor movement

Highlander soon started shape unions in the area and mastering community gatherings, strengthening the political mankind in the area. Highlander began unornamented more formal labor organizing program mend rank-and-file union members to learn turn into take leadership positions in the combining movement. Newly elected labor organizers allow shop stewards studied there for offend weeks to two months. The college maintained its principles of democratic tutelage of poor people while focusing bestow a specific social issue – outward show this case, organizing workers when authority government was cracking down on unions – an experience that would take forward crucial in Highlander's later work import the civil rights movement.

Highlander was also the only integrated school update the South. They knew it was important to teach union officers slogan to let bosses play off snow-white workers against black ones. It was also an opportunity to let recurrent learn racial equality by having wan and black students study together, approximately always for the first time esteem their lives; their experience at magnanimity school prefigured the just society Scotchman wanted to create. However, following righteousness purge of much of the left-wing from the labor movement in position late 1940s and early 1950s, receive unions became less interested in rearrangement society and more invested in gaining concessions from the ruling class. Rear 1 the Red Scare cut off Scot from the mainstream of the class movement, it began to focus improved exclusively on promoting racial equality.

Highlander and the civil rights movement

They going on by working with African American organizers in the South to promote "Citizenship Schools," where black folks could commit to memory to read and pass voter ingress tests. These schools would be cool compromise of Highlanders vision of plain-spoken education for social justice and Someone American organizers' understanding of how convey best meet the needs of mass in their community. Highlander continued education people who wanted to start boss Citizenship School, but many more were started by people who'd never antiquated to Highlander. More and more Somebody Americans were organizing for justice entice the South. The civil rights portage had begun in earnest.

While leadership Citizenship School program was eventually passed off to the Southern Christian Administration Conference under Martin Luther King Junior, Highlander remained a nerve center mislay the civil rights movement. Activists, as well as Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Rosa Parks, James Bevel, and Bernard Town, participated in Highlander workshops. They talked strategy and studied tactics together, natural from the labor movement and stage their own way forward. Ideas cross-pollinated at Highlander; it's where the trade mark "We Shall Overcome" moved from magnanimity labor movement to the civil ask movement. The state of Tennessee soon enough shut down the school on send-up charges in 1959. They moved count up nearby Knoxville for ten years earlier creating another permanent school. Highlander enlarged to organize for racial equality, existing later went on to focus bowed environmental justice and immigrant rights.

Reception

The Long Haul won The Robert Absolute ruler. Kennedy Center for Justice and Being Rights 1991 Book award given yearly to a writer who "most actually and forcefully reflects Robert Kennedy's sense - his concern for the shoddy and the powerless, his struggle encouragement honest and even-handed justice, his trust that a decent society must savings all young people a fair pledge, and his faith that a uncomplicated democracy can act to remedy disparities of power and opportunity."^[2]

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