I came across an index card last week. It must have fallen out one of the books we’ve been carrting around for years and have begun to weed out. It was a reference to a “Hart, J. K.” and a book, Light from the north with the notation, “1926. folk high schools in Denmark” and some Dewey Decimal System markings. It was from a time at West Virginia University when I first became acquainted with a literature on folk schools. We had been to some during our sojourn in western North Carolina. Markey, in fact, participated in a calf birthing while visiting the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown. And we knew some folks from Berea College and John Ramsey’s work on folk schools. Then working at Mars Hill College, Markey and I took students to Highlander, which had reopened in New market, Tennessee and we got acquainted Myles Horton and those “activists.” But it wasn’t until browsing the library at WVU that I stumbled upon these works on the folk school movement in the US, popular particularly in the Scandinavian tinged Midwest.

I thought this guy, J. K. Hart, was just a writer… maybe an educator… writing on folk schools. But when I Googled him, I found a whole worth of material. Joseph Kinmont Hart studied with George Herbert Meade at the University of Chicago and a proponent of John Dewey and what has come to be called the progressive reform movement in education. He was also outspoken advocate of reform and a favorite of students wherever he taught. That is if the students were willing to think or go “against the grain.” He taught at the University of Washington wherte he got involved with local issues of equality, inclusiveness and labor rights. He quickly became known for leading radical crusades. This in the second decade of the 20th Century. He was dismissed in 1916. He then went to Reed College and was dismissed in 1920. In the interims between university teaching, Hart wrote books and edited magazines.

This background on Hart comes from a paper by Deron Boyles entitled, “Joseph Kinmont Hart and Vanderbilt University: The Rise and Fall of a Department of Education, 1930-1934.” The link is here [Boyles, Deron R., "Joseph Kinmont Hart and Vanderbilt University: The Rise and Fall of a Department of Education, 1930-1934" (2003). Faculty Publications. Paper 10.
http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/eps_facpub/10]

In his short stay at Vanderbilt one of his students was Myles Horton. He made a pilgrimage to Denmark as well and visited its folk highschools. He came back, of course, and started Highlander with two friends. The rest history.

TheBoyles paper is an interesting read and is a case of academic freedom. I found it interesting, also, that even as early as the 1920s Vanderbilt had designs on acquiring Peabody.