What did you learn in school today, dear little boy of mine? I learned that Washington never told a lie. I learned that soldiers seldom die.
I learned that everybody's free. That's what the teacher said to me. And that's what I learned in school today.
That's what I learned in school. What if there was a school where you could learn to change the world? That's not a line from a sappy protest song.
not a bumper sticker you'd see right next to, I break for unicorns. That was the very real dream of a man some called the hillbilly intellectual and others the hillbilly radical, Miles Horton. That dream's official name today is the Highlander Research and Education Center, but everybody calls it the Highlander School, and it's been changing the world since 1932. One of Highlander's first students, Henry Thomas, described it best.
The most important thing people ever learned from Highlander, he said, was how we could help ourselves. The dream began in Horton's dissatisfaction with the education profession he'd chosen. It seemed like ordinary people couldn't learn anything about their own lives and problems. All they studied was how other people lived, mostly people in high and distant places. If poor folks could learn about their own lives, gather together to study their own problems, maybe they could figure out how to solve them.
Maybe they could learn how to make those lives better. Well, with a philosophy like that, it didn't take Horton long to get into trouble. In 1932, Highlander opened in one of the poorest counties in Tennessee.
Horton picked the name Highlander because it was not what city people or academics called the folks of the Southern Mountains. It was what those people called themselves. Almost immediately, the school got involved in helping nearby workers organize a strike. Common problems, common solutions. Horton was arrested, charged with, and I quote, coming here and getting information and going back and teaching it.
Charges were later dismissed for, and I quote, lack of evidence. Highlander didn't just want people to learn about their political and economic problems, but to cherish their own culture, art, and music. You didn't learn Mozart, you learned mountain music.
You didn't learn how to waltz like a king, but to clog like your neighbors. And the musical heart of Highlander was Miles'wife, Zilphia May Horton. She was a remarkable woman who took equal joy in striding a picket line and shooting squirrels on a frosty morning.
She ended a letter to her husband by bragging, I shot a cigarette in the center the other day, sort of restored my self-respect. If it is possible to have a genius for listening, Zilphia Horton was that genius. It made people want to open up to her, share their struggles, secret hopes and midnight worries. And to sing with her, Zilphia loved to sing.
Music is the language of and to life, she said. The people can be made aware that many of the songs about their everyday lives, songs about their work, hopes, their joys, and sorrows, are songs of merit. This gives them a new sense of dignity and pride. Highlander was soon known mostly as a labor organizing school. By 1942, it was estimated that 90% of its alumni were either union officials or organizers.
But as the unions became more successful, more entrenched, They became less interested in teaching their members how to agitate. As naturally as a crick bends around a big rock, Highlander moved its energies toward the nascent civil rights movement. The whole world knows that in 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give her bus seat to a white man, as then required by Alabama law.
What's less well known is that six months earlier, she attended Highlander. It didn't give her the idea. She already had that. What it did do was show her that there were white people as angry about racism as she was.
At Highlander, she said later, I found out for the first time in my adult life that this could be a unified society. Again seeking common solutions for common problems, Highlander created citizenship schools, where poor blacks could learn how to pass the literacy tests that southern states used to keep them from voting. The director for that was Septima Clark, who became known as the grandmother of the civil rights movement, and who understood Horton's crazy dream better than most. I have a great belief, she said, that whenever there is chaos, it creates wonderful thinking.
I consider chaos a gift. It was in the civil rights struggle that Highlander became most famous, and famous for a song. How that happened is a textbook example of Highlander working exactly the way it was designed. From the start, the civil rights movement had songs, lots of songs, but it didn't have a song. One unifying and irresistible anthem that not only said who they were, but that musically expressed all their hope, determination, and spirit.
Septima Clark, Pete Seeger, and a new young staffer named Guy Carowan began adapting an old hymn-turned-labor song that Sylphia loved to sing. The word will was changed to shall, some verses were fitted to the new movement's goals, and the tempo was changed so people could march to it better. It became We Shall Overcome. We shall overcome.
Deep in my heart I do believe. We shall overcome. No, I joined hands so often with students and others behind jail bars singing it.
We shall overcome. Sometimes we've had tears in our eyes when we joined together to sing it, but we still decided to sing A lot of fuss has been made over the years about exactly who changed what, but in the most elemental way, this was Miles Horton's dream incarnate. A community coming together to identify a common problem and solve it together.
We Shall Overcome was carved from the honest wood of tradition, tempered for years in poor churches and angry picket lines, refitted for the next people's movement and taken out into the world singer to singer, march to march. Jail cell to jail cell, cause to cause. From Birmingham to Belgrade.
Tiananmen Square to Tripoli. It belongs to the people because that's who created it. Who gave the world its best-known changing-the-world song? Why, a school for changing the world did.
A school named Highlander. Today, Director Pam McMichael says the greatest way Highlander has changed is how it has not changed. It was built to be fluid, to form its curriculum from the problems people brought to it, the questions they asked, and the answers they found together.
The issues may sound different, immigrants'rights, environmental justice, gender and sex discrimination, but they're not, not really. It's still about real people finding a real voice in this world. and then figuring out how to use it.
The songs may have different dialects, built more from hip-hop than hymns, Hispanic than hoedown, but the mission is the same, the dream is the same. Like a good folk song, Highlander remains alive because it remains real, because it belongs to all the people who take it into their lives, and through its timeless and always timely melody, learn how to make those lives better. The most important verse is the one they wrote down in Montgomery, Alabama.
They said, we are not afraid. And the young people taught everybody else a lesson. All the older people that had learned how to compromise and learned how to take it easy and be polite and get along and leave things as they were.