Highlander Research and Education Center


Highlander Research and Education Center,

New Market, Tenn.; founded as the Highlander Folk School in 1932 in Monteagle, Tenn., by Myles Horton (1905–90), who was influenced Denmark's folk high schoolsfolk high school,
type of adult education that in its most widely known form originated in Denmark in the middle of the 19th cent. The idea as originally conceived by Bishop Nikolai Grundtvig was to stimulate the intellectual life of young adults (generally from 18 to 25 years
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. At first the school focused on training union organizers, but in the 1950s Highlander became a center of the civil-rightscivil rights,
rights that a nation's inhabitants enjoy by law. The term is broader than "political rights," which refer only to rights devolving from the franchise and are held usually only by a citizen, and unlike "natural rights," civil rights have a legal as well as a
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 movement. The state of Tennessee revoked the school's charter in 1961 and seized its facilites, but Horton reopened under the current name and relocated, first to Knoxville and then to New Market. In the 1980s the school shifted to balancing environmental concerns with the struggle for economic recovery in the South while maintaining its traditional focus on equality and social justice.