Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk School: An Enduring Exemplar of Rural Education for Democratic Engagement

Georgia Southern University faculty member Robert L. Lake co-authored "Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk School: An Enduring Exemplar of Rural Education for Democratic Engagement" alongside non-faculty member Andy Blunden in Forgotten Places: Critical Studies in Rural Education .

Book Summary: Forgotten Places: Critical Studies in Rural Education critically investigates and informs the construction of the rural, rural identity and the understanding of the rural internationally. This book promotes and expands the notion of critical understandings of rural education, particularly in the areas of race, class, gender, and LGBTQ, with conceptualizations of social justice. While there have been many volumes written on critical issues in urban education, only a small number have been produced on rural education, and the majority of those are not critical. By contrast, Forgotten Places not only discusses "schools in the country," but also expands conceptualizations of the rural beyond schools and place as well as beyond the borders of the United States. It also tackles the artificial duality between conceptualizations of urban and rural. Forgotten Places includes scholarly investigations into the connections among the symbolic order, various forms of cultural artifacts and multiple readings of these artifacts within the context of critical/transformational pedagogy. This book fills a significant gap in the scholarly work on the ramifications of the rural.