Highlander Folk School Summary

School both reflects society and it adopts principles that aim to reproduce society. Because inequalities exist within society, many educators and specialists use education to try and combat the inequalities by starting in a microcosm. Some of these attempts, such as the curricula seen within To Sir with Love and Stand and Deliver, aim to work within the existing realm of society, but not to change its structure. Others, like Summerhill, aim to break down educational expectation and give power to the students. These programs however, lack certain principles that would make them ideal for students and society. Instead, the principles of Highlander Folk School, such as education for social reform, democratic and practical education, and education

As stated earlier, Horton designed Highlander Folk School to "contribute to social change" (144). And in order to change, "you couldn't act alone" (30). Highlander's educational goals were not simply to help individuals to better their own lives, but to work with communities and groups of people so that they can collectively talk about "shared experiences" and work cooperatively to find solutions to better their communities. Instead of these changes effecting individual students going to college or individual students desires not to read, they are focused on "changes in the structures of their communities" and eventually, "society" (147). Furthering this point, Horton makes the argument that you haven't really learned something "until you've demonstrated that you can pass it on" (167). In a sense, Horton is trying to create a new organic intellectual, people who take their new knowledge and bring it back to their communities with the goals of improvement. The other approaches to education, like Escalante's push of his individual students learning calculus to go to college or Neil's focus on individual student's desires, only aim to serve the individual person, not the community they belong to. Highlander Folk school provides a model of education that is designed around helping individuals work through their problems, but it does so by collaborating and organizing with people with shared experiences in order to reform the entire community for the