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Myles Horton

Summary

Myles Horton (1905–1990) was an American educator and the founder of the Highlander Folk School (1932) — the Appalachian adult-education centre that trained civil-rights movement leaders including Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Septima Clark, John Lewis, and Ralph Abernathy, and was a central site for the development of citizenship-school pedagogy. He is co-author with Paulo Freire of We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change (1990).

Key idea in this wiki

  • The Horton / Freire dialogue is the foundation the wiki’s training page builds on when treating popular education as the educational engine of organizing: education is not preparation for action but action in its own form; Seeds for Change documents the peer-led residential-training tradition as the lineage the Highlander Folk School pioneered [source: seeds-for-change].
  • The Highlander Folk School’s citizenship schools (developed by Septima Clark under Horton’s leadership) trained Black civic leaders across the US South in the 1950s-60s; the wiki’s popular-education and adult-learning concept pages draw on this lineage.
  • The We Make the Road by Walking dialogue with Freire is the wiki’s primary source for the Horton-Freire consensus on popular-education-as-movement-engine.
  • The Highlander model of peer-led residential education (rather than expert-led lecture) is the lineage behind the wiki’s workshop-design and adult-learning concept pages.

Why campaigners read him

Campaigners read Horton because Highlander (1932–present) is the contemporary operating model for peer-led residential training — the pedagogical form where the trainer is the curriculum-holder, not the expert-from-outside [source: seeds-for-change]. The citizenship-school tradition (Septima Clark under Highlander leadership) trained tens of thousands of Black southern civic leaders through local teachers serving as facilitators. The wiki uses Horton in training, popular-education, adult-learning, and workshop-design as the operating model for what a residential training programme should look like, and as the practitioner-side sibling of thinkers/paulo-freire’s classroom-pedagogy contribution.

Learn more

Open Questions

  • A primary Highlander-archives source page is not yet in the corpus; the framing here is grounded in the We Make the Road by Walking source page and the wiki’s existing popular-education concept pages.

Sources & verification

  • [we-make-the-road-by-walking](sourcing target — source page pending) — primary work, link-only
  • [highlander-archives](sourcing target — source page pending) — secondary reference

Last verified: 2026-07-03