Organizer as Radical Pedagogue: Myles Horton’s Theory of Democratic Education

• In Event: Organizing Struggles from Below

Abstract

This paper reconstructs Myles Horton’s pedagogical theory in order to illuminate the role of hierarchy in organizing. Organizing is widely understood as a process of changing people by making leaders, building a collective agent from isolated individuals, or “making democratic agents” of politically passive people (Han 2014; Dean 2016; Phulwani 2016). This orientation toward subjective change distinguishes the organizer from the activist, who mobilizes people for episodic actions, and the politician, who seeks support for policies but does not aim to fundamentally change his supporters. It also represents a potential contribution of the organizing tradition to democratic theory, viz., a more robust understanding of the relationship between individual and social transformation. But both the process of subject formation involved in organizing and its relationship to democracy remain under-theorized. What practices are involved in making a democratic agent? And how does this aspect of the organizer’s work relate to commitments to radical democracy within rank-and-file-led social movements? To what extent can participants in an emancipatory movement lead the process of their own subjective transformation and to what extent must the change be induced by a vanguard?

Radical pedagogy is one tradition that theorizes the place of authority and hierarchy in processes of emancipation (Freire & Horton 1990). In this paper, I compare radical pedagogy and organizing on the question of hierarchy by reconstructing Myles Horton’s theory of democratic education. Although he has generally been overlooked by political theorists, Horton is an influential theorist-practitioner of organizing and education whose work connects key moments in the American organizing tradition. The Highlander Folk School, which Horton founded in 1932, was the official training school of Congress of Industrial Organizations organizers from 1944-1950, the facilitator of the Citizenship Schools program from 1957-1961, and the host of several of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s formative meetings in the early 1960s. Horton’s theory of democratic education, which shaped many of Highlander’s programs, is thus an important articulation of the process of making democratic agents, which adapted approaches to labor organizing and education and influenced the organizing models that arose in the student movements of the 1960s. I draw on original archival research, histories of Highlander, biographies of Horton and Horton’s own published writings to bring his thought and practice into conversation with democratic theory.

While Horton himself worked as an organizer and taught organizers at Highlander, he consistently distinguished between organizing and education and insisted that Highlander was a school for adult education, “not an organizational school” (Moyers 1982). I consider the stakes of this distinction for Horton, arguing that it was motivated by his desire to avoid hierarchy in the process of emancipating marginalized peoples. His own experience as a labor organizer in the 1930s led him to the conclusion that hierarchy between organizers and those they organized was inevitable. He understood education to hold more egalitarian potential than organizing. I explain the key features of his radical pedagogy, which aimed to induce change without hierarchy. Within Highlander’s programs, the teacher’s role was to insist on the student’s expertise and potential efficacy in creating social change while moving continuously between positions of leadership of and subordination to the student. Having reconstructed Horton’s pedagogical theory, I challenge his distinction between organizing and education by showing the presence of hierarchy between teacher and student even within Highlander’s programs, and the similarities between the teacher’s work at Highlander and the organizer’s work in the field. I argue that, rather than avoiding the problem of hierarchy, Horton’s theory of democratic education points toward forms of hierarchy that may be indispensable to emancipatory political projects, and suggests practices that can prevent these hierarchies from becoming forms of domination.

Author

• Mie Inouye, Yale University