Nico Slate’s article, “‘The Answers Come from The People’: The Highlander Folk School and the Pedagogies of the Civil Rights Movement,” both furthers our knowledge of the role education played during the civil rights movement and challenges a conventional understanding of progressive education.[1] In May 2022, on the HEQ&A podcast, Slate further emphasized how a deep dive into the archives transformed his preconceived notions of progressive education and the pedagogics of the civil rights movement.[2] He proposes, consequently, a new hybrid pedagogical model to better understand how teachers taught and students learned at the Highlander Folk School and the subsequent Citizenship Schools. Slate offers the hybrid model as an alternative from strictly child- or teacher-centered pedagogies; education during the civil rights movement, he argues, used a mix of both pedagogical styles.

For me, Slate’s research presents three distinct takeaways. First, progressive education does not always come from the people. Second, laughter is key when educating for social change. Third, although Slate does not mention Gert Biesta’s work in this article, I find that both Highlander and the Citizenship Schools stand as historical examples of Biesta’s theory of world-centered education.

Education is messy. The philosopher and progressive educator John Dewey used this insight to uproot the traditional role of the teacher. For Dewey, a progressive teacher must focus not on direct instruction but on creation—the creation of an educative environment that connects what students learn to how they live. In contrast to traditionalists, who favor the authority of textbooks and teachers, progressives use a student’s lived experiences to make education both relevant and democratic. As Slate points out, many people assume that for progressive education to work, the students should dictate what happens in the classroom. But, as he argues and as a close reading of Dewey shows, progressive education relies on conjoined activity. The answers, as a result, must simultaneously come from both the teacher and those being taught.

In an illustrative audio recorded exchange mixed with analysis, Slate details the essence of progressive education. In this exchange, the veteran activist and teacher, Dorothy Cotton,[3] leads an inquiry into the nature of citizenship with a bold assertion: “until you become a registered voter, you are not a citizen.”[4] But, her student retorts, “citizens have rights.”[5] With Socratic authority and inductive reasoning, Cotton guides the student to expand their knowledge. “We have constitutional rights to march,” Cotton expounds, “the Constitution of the United States gives you the right to petition. A march is a form of petitioning.”[6] Here the teacher and student interplay to find answers. Cotton encourages her student to connect their lived experience of marching to an expansive, radical understanding of “citizenship as struggle.”[7]

 Humor between teachers and students boosts learning and builds relational trust. Feelings of solidarity are necessary for an inclusive pedagogy. A laugh creates camaraderie and intelligent reflection in both classrooms and workshops. Slate details moments of laughter to show how humor deepens a sense of belonging for the activists and builds trust for meaningful reflection while they are in a community of inquiry.

For example, during the “Experimental Workshop on Adult Education” in 1961, an eruption of laughter creates space for group reflection. A student observes that “everyone was talking about ‘when we get there.’”[8] Amusingly, he asks “where is there?”[9] Following laughter, “a reflective mood settled on the gathering, and the participants returned to discussing the many questions that remained unanswered.”[10] In pursuit of the unanswerable, laughter becomes instructive. Answers are not important for learning at Highlander and the Citizenship Schools; rather, the goal is to empower individuals in the struggle for racial justice so that—in solidarity—they will enact social change.

To better understand how the hybrid pedagogical model functions, Slate equates the top of an hourglass to the direct instruction of civil activism, the middle to the individual’s participation in the struggle for racial justice, and the bottom to the collective empowerment necessary for social change.[11] The hourglass metaphor encourages the reader to merge the dualism of teacher and child-centered pedagogies. Slate’s hybrid pedagogical model is like Biesta’s world-centered education, which presents itself as a third option between child- and curriculum-centered education.

There are three different ways in which education at Highlander and the Citizenship Schools resemble a world-centered education. First, intersubjectivity is prized. As activist Elanor Aragon attests, the real benefit was not “learning specifics [but] being in a house with people I loved and I could talk and not be afraid.”[12] Second, teacher agency reigns. Central to Slate’s argument, a wide range of experts were invited by Myles Horton to directly instruct the activists at Highlander. While at the Citizenship Schools, Septima Poinsette Clark envisions the teacher to be more than a facilitator and more like an architect. “The purpose,” Clark explains, “is to take people where they are…and bring them up to where they should be.”[13] Third, the education at Highlander and the Citizenship Schools focuses more on the process of becoming a Subject than accumulation of knowledge or assimilating to the existing social order.

In World-Centered Education: A View for the Present, Biesta presents the Parks-Eichmann Paradox.[14] While at Highlander, Parks grew into a person with dignity (i.e., subjectification), thus, she became empowered to say: I am here, and I won’t move. In contrast, Eichmann simply followed Nazi curricula–thus his defense: It wasn’t me.[15] Note the I versus me. As Biesta points out, the pronoun usage encapsulates the difference between education that prioritizes subjectification versus education that does not.[16]  Intersubjectivity, teacher agency, and the promotion of subjectification—all exhibited at both Highlander and the Citizenship Schools—form the pillars of a world-centered education.  

In sum, Slate’s impressive historical research and critical educational analysis pushes beyond convention. His use of the rich archival materials especially encourages future historians of education to follow the model: unearth a wide array of multimedia and print sources to not only recreate the past but to disrupt normative, dichotomous thinking. Perhaps the most compelling part of Slate’s findings come not from the paper itself, but from his research journey. Slate began convinced that the answers came only from the people, but as he listened and read the sources, they led him to a more expansive, inclusive understanding of who the people were and where their answers came from.    

[1] Nico Slate, “‘The Answers Come from The People’: The Highlander Folk School and the Pedagogies of the Civil Rights Movement.” History of Education Quarterly 62, no. 2 (2022): 191–210. doi:10.1017/heq.2022.4.

[2] Nico Slate, “The Highlander Folk School and the Pedagogies of the Civil Rights Movement,” May, 2022, in HEQ&A, produced by Jack Schneider, podcast, MP3 audio, 00:11:13, https://soundcloud.com/heqanda/the-highlander-folk-school.

[3] Slate, “The Answers,” 205. The recording of Cotton teaching is from a “session held for aspiring citizenship school teachers.”

[4] Slate, “The Answers,” 205.

[5] Slate, “The Answers,” 205.

[6] Slate, “The Answers,” 205.

[7] Slate, “The Answers,” 201.

[8] Slate, “The Answers,” 206.

[9] Slate, “The Answers,” 206.

[10] Slate, “The Answers,” 206.

[11] Slate, “The Answers,” 210.

[12] Slate, “The Answers,” 208.

[13] Slate, “The Answers,” 206.

[14] Gert Biesta, World-Centered Education: A View for the Present (New York: Routledge, 2021) 28.    

[15] Biesta, World-Centered, 28.

[16] Biesta, World-Centered, 29.