Myles Horton Reader: Education for Social Change (review)

Because the authors allow the voices of the Glenmary/FOCIS women to tell their own stories, their messages resonate all the clearer. In reference to their decades-long discussions on theology, several members are asked to reflect near the end of the book on the connections between theology and community that have guided them. One says, "Vatican II said, 'The people are the church.' This community is the church" (230). Another states, "...theology is faith seeking understanding in community. That is FOCIS theology" (231). If essence were to be distilled from Mountain Sisters, it would be the vital importance and inherent beauty in community. The Glenmarys were a community of sisters joined by a desire for adventure and belief in the power of mission. After their split with the Church, FOCIS became their community, which has served as both a vehicle of transition for these women as well as a deep well that nourishes their individual spirits and their collective souls. FOCIS members facilitated many of Appalachia's first community-based projects, communityoperated health care clinics, community development corporations, and community-based research and education. The women who were once seen as "witches," "hippies," "radicals," and "communists" are now the wise women who can reflect on lives devoted, in truth and action, to justice. These mountain sisters are the elders of wisdom, elders of spirit worthy of emulation. —Lori Briscoe Pennington Dale Jacobs, ed. Myles Horton Reader: Educationfor Social Change. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003. 360 pages. Paperback. $24.95. On hearing that Myles Horton's writings were being compiled for publication, more than one of his old friends was heard to say, 'Well, that's good, but it'll be a very slim volume." Horton was a talker, a storyteller, not a writer, and over the course of his long and interesting life he was seldom viewed as a writer. Horton was, first and foremost, a "do-er," known far and wide as a founder and director of Highlander Folk School (the Highlander Research and Education Center since 1965). For over fifty years Horton was the guiding light of Highlander, and Highlander played a leading role in labor, civil rights, environmental and other struggles for justice in the South. So the 275-page Myles Horton Reader will come as a surprise to many. Nevertheless, Dale Jacobs has pulled together a really 88 substantial collection of written materials that are in Horton's own words, if not actually written by him: transcripts of videotaped interviews, texts of speeches, notes for talks and essays, as well as published articles he wrote. The material covers the period from the early 1930s, when the idea of Highlander took shape and became a reality, to 1989, a year before Horton's death at age eighty-four. Horton made his mark on the history of Southern movements for social change through his ability to bring people together to discuss their problems and issues, ask the right questions, listen, and find their own answers. In Horton's words, "Highlander's role is to get people together then get out of their way." From the labor schools in the 1930s and '40s, through the citizenship schools and civil rights movement of the '50s and early '60s, the work in the southern Appalachians in the '60s and '70s, the environmental and international linkages work of the '80s and '90s, to today's focus on immigrant issues, among others, Highlander has nurtured leaders and supported everydaypeople as theymake changes in their communities and in our nation. Over its long history, Highlander's workhas been guidedby Horton's originalvision ofeducation as a means of empowering people to create their own history and to change society. Dale Jacobs, a teacher of English and composition at the University of Windsor, in Ontario, Canada, first learned about Highlander and Myles Horton back in the mid 1990s, through exposure to a brief mention of Horton's approach to education. Interested in empowerment education, Jacobs was intrigued and set off on a search for writings by this activist and educational innovator. Instead of finding books by Horton, he found books about him and Highlander, so he turned to the various Highlander archives for original...