Unearthing Seeds of Fire: The Idea of Highlander

by Frank Adams

Highlander serves as a catalyst for grassroots organizing and movement building in Appalachia and the South. We work with people fighting for justice, equality and sustainability, supporting their efforts to take collective action to shape their own destiny. Through popular education, participatory research, and cultural work, we help create spaces ― at Highlander and in local communities ― where people gain knowledge, hope and courage, expanding their ideas of what is possible. We develop leadership and help create and support strong, democratic organizations that work for justice, equality and sustainability in their own communities and that join with others to build broad movements for social, economic and restorative environmental change.

Genres: Education, History, Nonfiction, Social Justice

255 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1975

Reviews

[Dewin Anguas Barnette · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awesome resource on an amazing approach to learning. If everyone in our country could just read the first and last summarizing chapters, they would understand the true meaning of education, and it would change our nation entirely. While Highlander worked with mainly adult education, I believe that its ideals should be applied to all ages and all types of learning. Myles Horton was a man who saw the true beauty of knowledge and remained devoted to his ideals throughout his life, regardless of the many attacks on him and his program.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this on the bus with the NAN crew on the week-before-the-inauguration march in 2016.

This book is a wonderful read and destroys the notion that Rosa Parks just randomly decided to stick up for herself. It details the evolution of an ideology of protest and the literal construction of a base for support in rural Tennessee.

It does a great job of showing how the ideas that Miles Horton had saw realization in practice and in actual embodiment. It's like a Foxfire book book written about building a base for revolt and training.

[CTEP]

Over the summer I attended a conference for adult basic education practitioners in Minnesota. At the conference I attended a breakout session detailing the history of adult basic education in the United States, and its radically compassionate underpinnings: settlement houses for new immigrants, literacy schools for disenfranchised black voters in the Jim Crow south, labor organizing schools for workers with high school educations or less. Myles Horton and his Highlander Folk School offer another example of this radical compassion, which Frank Adams details in his pseudo-biography Unearthing Seeds of Fire:The Idea of Highlander. At the end of the Gilded Age, just as the Great Depression began to take hold of the world, Myles Horton developed an ambitious plan to educate low-income workers in the deeply-impoverished South. He built his Highlander Folk School in rural Tennessee, based in part on folk schools found throughout Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. A self-identified socialist and active union organizer, Horton leveraged his connections to the echelons of academic society for funding and began attracting workers from all over the south. Students worked with Horton to develop the curriculum, and together they taught, learned, lived, and worked to produce a more equitable south. Of course wealthy landowners and state actors found this threatening and attempted again and again to either shut the school down through legal means or destroy the school using vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Even after a hundred years of violence and vitriol directed at the school, Highlander still exists in Tennessee, serving the same populations it has always served, but with a broader social justice mandate.

Most surprising throughout the book was Horton’s ability to adapt the school’s mission to the needs of its students and the greater Southern community. As culture shifts occurred in the United States and focus shifted from labor organizing to civil rights struggles, Horton too shifted the focus of Highlander to address those struggles. Despite his own desire to continue running the school, as often as possible Horton ceded decision-making responsibilities to those most oppressed peoples attending the school, from disenfranchised and segregated black folks to disgruntled workers to women seeking their own liberation. His willingness to listen and change ensured that Highlander continued to serve the South for decades despite countless setbacks. It also empowered students of Highlander to continue their work outside of the school and spread the radical compassion emanating from its classrooms.

Any CTEP members serving at adult basic education sites will find this book rewarding and informative, but anyone interested in social justice movements or the continuing fights for enfranchisement, labor rights, and civil rights ought to read this book. Aside from the empowering narrative of the Highlander Folk School, Adams includes many details about how the school functioned and the steps administrators and teachers and students took to keep it running, which could serve as a model for similar schools.

[Diana Eidson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very readable and interesting look at Myles Horton's Highlander FOlk School.

[Lucas Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not sure how helpful this will be with my Student Leadership project in the long run, but this book reaffirmed my belief that Myles Horton is a cornerstone in why I'm an educator and how I want to develop as a teacher.

I am anxious to read more, learn more, and be more like the idea of Highlander.

Written in the language of the staff, and very much from the 1970s, this is a good introduction, if a bit anecdotal.

[Jayda · Rating 2 out of 5]

I enjoyed the last chapter the most. I think it gave me the most condensed version of what Highlander was all about. I truly got lost in the historical elements and think this book focused more on that than the inner functions of Highlander itself. It's all tied together of course, but I expected more detailed reviews of what happened inside of Highlander, in their various workshops, etc. versus a massive walk through history.

[Hapa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very inspirational book. If a movement and its movers do not exist, they can be made.

[Michael Law]

Interesting take, but less usefull than other Highlander bios.

[Maughn Gregory · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty much the same story Myles Horton told in his own autobiography, but by a journalist, so with more detail and context. A very important story in US history.