Chapter 25: Education and the Fight for Literacy — From Settlement Schools to Consolidation

"We came to serve, but I wonder sometimes who we thought we were serving and what we thought was wrong with them. The children were not ignorant. They were brilliant in the ways their lives demanded. They could identify a hundred plants by sight, track a deer through laurel thickets, predict weather by the sky. What they couldn't do was parse a sentence the way we parsed sentences in Boston. We decided that was the problem. We were wrong about that." — Evelyn Holbrook, former settlement school teacher, oral history interview, Hindman Settlement School Archives, 1977

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

1. Trace the history of education in Appalachia from one-room subscription schools of the nineteenth century through the settlement school movement, the Highlander Folk School, and modern educational institutions
2. Analyze the dual nature of the settlement school movement as both an opportunity for educational access and a tool of cultural imposition that suppressed Appalachian language, music, and customs
3. Describe the Highlander Folk School's radical vision of education as social organizing and explain its role in training leaders of both the labor and civil rights movements
4. Evaluate the consequences of mid-twentieth-century school consolidation for rural Appalachian communities, including the loss of community social centers and the educational costs of long bus rides on mountain roads

Introduction: What Counts as Education

Before we tell the story of schools in Appalachia, we need to tell the story of learning in Appalachia, because they are not the same thing.

The mountain people of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were not, by any honest measure, uneducated. They possessed a vast body of practical knowledge that was transmitted orally from generation to generation — knowledge of medicinal plants, weather patterns, animal behavior, soil composition, building techniques, food preservation, navigation by stars and landmarks, and a hundred other skills that meant the difference between survival and death in a mountain environment. A woman who could identify two hundred plants and knew which ones healed wounds, which ones eased fever, and which ones would kill you was not uneducated. She was educated in a tradition that predated the public school system by millennia.

But she could not read.

And in a nation that increasingly defined literacy as the measure of civilization, that inability became the justification for an entire apparatus of intervention. Appalachian people were declared "backward," "benighted," and "in need of uplift" — the language of Chapter 14's outsider gaze — and the primary instrument of that uplift would be the school. The school would teach mountain children to read, to write, to speak "properly," to dress "appropriately," to worship "correctly," and to aspire to the values of middle-class Protestant America. The school would, in short, make them into something other than what they were.

This chapter traces the complicated, contradictory, and deeply important history of education in Appalachia — a history that includes genuine sacrifice by dedicated teachers who walked mountain trails to reach isolated students, and also genuine violence against children who were punished for speaking the language of their parents. It includes institutions that opened doors that would otherwise have remained closed, and also institutions that taught mountain children to be ashamed of who they were. It includes one of the most radical educational experiments in American history — the Highlander Folk School — and one of the most devastating acts of bureaucratic destruction — the school consolidation movement that gutted rural communities across the region.

Education in Appalachia was never just about reading and writing. It was always about power — the power to define what knowledge counts, whose culture is valid, and who gets to decide what a child needs to know.

The One-Room School: Education Before the System

In the early Republic and throughout the antebellum period, formal education in Appalachia was sparse, decentralized, and largely a matter of community initiative.

The earliest schools in the mountains were subscription schools — informal arrangements in which a community would hire a teacher (often an itinerant young man or, occasionally, a woman) and each participating family would pay a subscription fee to support the teacher's salary. The school might meet in a church, a private home, or a rough log building constructed for the purpose. The term lasted as long as the community could afford to pay the teacher — sometimes a few weeks, sometimes a few months. The curriculum was basic: reading, writing, arithmetic, and, in many cases, the Bible.

Common schools — publicly funded schools open to all children — arrived in Appalachia later and more unevenly than in other parts of the country. The common school movement, which swept the northeastern United States in the 1830s and 1840s under the influence of education reformers like Horace Mann, reached the mountain South slowly. The obstacles were formidable: the population was widely dispersed across isolated hollows, tax revenues were minimal in a subsistence economy, and there was no road network capable of transporting children to centralized facilities. By the Civil War, many Appalachian communities still lacked any formal school at all.

Where schools did exist, they were overwhelmingly one-room schools — single-room buildings, typically of log or frame construction, serving all grades together under a single teacher. The students ranged in age from six to sixteen or older. The teacher, who might have only a few years of education beyond the students themselves, was responsible for teaching all subjects to all ages simultaneously. The school year was shaped by agricultural necessity: students attended when they could be spared from farm work, which often meant that the school operated only in winter months or during the brief periods between planting and harvest.

The one-room school has been romanticized in American memory — the little red schoolhouse of nostalgic imagination — but the reality was often harsh. The buildings were cold in winter, with a single wood stove that roasted the children nearest to it and left those at the back of the room shivering. Books were scarce. Paper and pencils were luxuries. The teacher's authority was maintained, in many cases, by physical punishment — the hickory switch was a standard pedagogical tool.

And yet. The one-room school served a function that went beyond its educational mission. It was a community gathering place. It was where elections were held, where quilting bees met, where church services were conducted when no church building was available. The school was, in many hollows, the only public building — the only space that belonged to the community as a whole rather than to a single family. Its role as a social center would become critically important when, decades later, consolidation advocates proposed to close it.

The Settlement Schools: Uplift and Erasure

The settlement school movement arrived in Appalachia at the turn of the twentieth century, part of the broader wave of outside intervention described in Chapter 14 — the moment when educated, well-intentioned outsiders "discovered" Appalachian poverty and decided to fix it.

The settlement schools were modeled, loosely, on the urban settlement houses of the Progressive Era — Jane Addams's Hull House in Chicago being the most famous example. But while the urban settlement houses served immigrant populations in cities, the Appalachian settlement schools served native-born American communities in the mountains. The distinction mattered: the settlement house movement assumed that immigrants needed help adapting to American life. The settlement school movement assumed that mountain Americans needed help becoming American — that they were, in William Goodell Frost's notorious phrase from Chapter 14, "our contemporary ancestors," frozen in time, and that education was the tool that would bring them into the present.

The Hindman Settlement School, founded in 1902 in Knott County, Kentucky, by May Stone and Katherine Pettit, was the first settlement school in Appalachia and became the model for dozens of others. Stone and Pettit were Kentucky women from prominent families — educated, progressive, and motivated by a genuine desire to improve the lives of mountain children. They had visited the area through the traveling "industrial" programs of the Women's Christian Temperance Union and been moved by what they saw: children without access to schools, families without access to healthcare, communities without access to the broader world.

The Hindman Settlement School offered academic instruction, vocational training, healthcare, and cultural programming. It built dormitories for students who lived too far away to attend daily. It trained teachers who went out to staff one-room schools across the region. It established a library, a garden program, and craft workshops. By any material measure, it improved the lives of the children and families it served.

The Pine Mountain Settlement School, founded in 1913 in Harlan County, Kentucky, by William Creech Sr. — a local farmer who donated the land — and Katherine Pettit (who had moved on from Hindman) along with Ethel de Long, followed a similar model but placed greater emphasis on environmental education and sustainable agriculture. Pine Mountain was notable for its location in the heart of coal country and for the tension between its educational mission and the coal industry's economic dominance.

Other settlement schools followed: the Caney Creek Community Center (later Alice Lloyd College) in Knott County, the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, North Carolina, and others scattered across the region. Together, they constituted a significant intervention in Appalachian education — bringing resources, training, and opportunity to communities that the public school system had neglected.

What the Settlement Schools Got Right

The settlement schools' contributions were real. They:

• Provided access to education in communities where public schools were inadequate or nonexistent
• Trained hundreds of teachers who went on to staff schools across the region, multiplying the schools' impact far beyond their immediate enrollment
• Introduced healthcare services — including prenatal care, childhood vaccination, and dental care — to communities that had no access to physicians
• Preserved and promoted Appalachian craft traditions — weaving, woodworking, basket-making, quilting — by creating markets for handmade goods and teaching traditional skills alongside academic subjects
• Created scholarship pipelines that sent mountain students to colleges and universities, opening doors that might otherwise have remained permanently closed

What the Settlement Schools Got Wrong

But the settlement schools also imposed a cultural agenda that was, in many ways, as damaging as the material deprivation they addressed. The same institutions that taught reading and arithmetic also taught mountain children that their own culture was inferior — that their speech was incorrect, their customs were primitive, their music was crude, and their way of life was something to be overcome rather than valued.

Dialect suppression was perhaps the most systematic and the most personal. Children who spoke Appalachian English — the dialect described in Chapter 31, with its deep historical roots and its rich linguistic features — were corrected, ridiculed, and in some cases punished. The message was explicit: the way your parents and grandparents speak is wrong. If you want to succeed in the wider world, you must learn to speak differently. You must, in effect, learn to sound like someone from somewhere else.

The cultural consequences of this linguistic shaming were profound and lasting. Children who were taught that their parents' speech was "wrong" internalized a broader message: that their parents themselves were wrong — backward, ignorant, in need of correction. The settlement schools, however unintentionally, drove a wedge between generations, teaching children to look down on the culture that had raised them.

Musical suppression followed a similar pattern. Settlement school teachers, trained in classical music traditions, often dismissed Appalachian ballad-singing and string-band music as "crude" or "unsuitable." Some schools replaced traditional music instruction with hymns and classical pieces deemed more "elevating." The irony was bitter: the very ballad traditions that the settlement schools dismissed were simultaneously being "discovered" by folklorists like Cecil Sharp, who traveled to the Appalachian mountains specifically to collect the British Isles ballads that the settlement schools were suppressing.

Religious regulation was another dimension of cultural imposition. Many settlement schools were affiliated with mainline Protestant denominations — Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Methodist — and their approach to religious education reflected the theology and worship practices of those traditions. Children from Baptist, Holiness, or Pentecostal families were taught that their own religious practices were excessive, emotional, or theologically unsound. The camp meeting tradition, the shaped-note singing, the fervent preaching that was central to mountain religious life — all were treated as problems to be corrected rather than traditions to be respected.

Whose Story Is Missing? The settlement school archives — housed at institutions like the Hindman Settlement School, the Pine Mountain Settlement School, and Berea College — contain extensive records of the teachers' perspectives: their letters home, their annual reports, their reflections on their work. The students' perspectives are far less documented. What did the children think when they were told their speech was wrong? What did their parents think when their children came home speaking differently and looking at their home culture with new eyes? The few oral histories that exist suggest a complex mix of gratitude and resentment — gratitude for the educational opportunity and resentment for the cultural cost. But these voices are underrepresented in the historical record, and any honest account of the settlement schools must acknowledge whose stories are still missing.

Berea College: Education for the Mountains

Berea College, founded in 1855 in Berea, Kentucky, by the abolitionist minister John G. Fee, occupies a unique place in Appalachian educational history. Fee founded Berea on two radical principles: it would be interracial, admitting Black and white students on an equal basis, and it would charge no tuition, making higher education accessible to students who could not afford it.

Both principles were extraordinary for their time and place. Berea was located in the slaveholding South, and its interracial mission made it a target for violence from the beginning. Fee was driven out of the state on multiple occasions. The school was shut down during the Civil War. It reopened afterward and, for the next four decades, operated as one of the few genuinely integrated institutions in the South, educating Black and white students together in a region where segregation was the law and the custom.

In 1904, the Kentucky legislature passed the Day Law, which prohibited interracial education — a law specifically designed to force Berea College to segregate. Berea challenged the law all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and lost. Forced to choose, Berea's trustees decided to focus on educating white mountain students, directing their Black students to a new institution, Lincoln Institute, near Louisville. The decision was painful and controversial, and its legacy remains debated.

After the Day Law, Berea redirected its mission toward serving the Appalachian region specifically. Under President William Goodell Frost — the same man whose "Our Contemporary Ancestors" essay had done so much to shape the outsider image of Appalachian people (Chapter 14) — Berea positioned itself as the college for the mountains: an institution that would educate mountain students, send them back to their communities as teachers and leaders, and thereby "uplift" the region.

Frost's vision was contradictory. He genuinely cared about mountain students and created real educational opportunities for thousands of them. But his framing of the mountain people as quaint relics in need of modernization reinforced the very stereotypes that justified the region's neglect. Berea's mission was simultaneously liberating and condescending — opening doors while defining the people who walked through them as deficient.

Despite these contradictions, Berea's contributions to Appalachian education were immense. Its no-tuition policy (maintained to this day — every admitted student receives a full-tuition scholarship) made higher education accessible to students from families that could not have afforded any other college. Its labor program, which required all students to work as part of their education, removed the stigma associated with working-class backgrounds. Its craft programs preserved and promoted Appalachian artisan traditions. And its graduates — teachers, nurses, ministers, lawyers, social workers — went back to the mountains in disproportionate numbers, serving the communities that had produced them.

The Highlander Folk School: Education as Revolution

If the settlement schools represented education as uplift — outsiders teaching mountain people to be more like the outsiders — then the Highlander Folk School represented something radically different: education as organizing, knowledge as power, and the insistence that the people who faced a problem were the ones best equipped to solve it.

Highlander was founded in 1932 in Monteagle, Tennessee, by Myles Horton, a young Tennessean who had studied at Union Theological Seminary in New York and traveled to Denmark to observe the Danish folk school movement. Horton returned to Appalachia with a vision of education that was unlike anything the region — or the nation — had seen.

The folk school model, as Horton adapted it, was built on a simple but revolutionary premise: education should not be something done TO people by credentialed experts. It should be something done BY people, together, as a tool for understanding their own conditions and organizing to change them. The teacher's role was not to deliver knowledge from above but to facilitate a process in which participants drew on their own experience to analyze the problems they faced and develop strategies for collective action.

Horton described the philosophy in characteristically plain language: "I just figured that if you could get people talking about their own problems and sharing what they knew, they would come up with better solutions than any expert could give them. Because they knew their situation. They lived it every day. What they didn't know was that other people were in the same situation, and that together they could do something about it."

The Labor Years

In its first two decades, Highlander focused on labor organizing in the Appalachian South. During the 1930s and 1940s, Highlander hosted workshops for union organizers, strikers, and rank-and-file workers from coal mines, textile mills, and other industries across the region. The workshops brought workers together to analyze their working conditions, develop organizing strategies, and build solidarity across workplace and sometimes racial lines.

Highlander's labor workshops were notable for their interracial character. At a time when the Jim Crow South enforced rigid racial segregation in virtually every public space, Highlander operated as an integrated institution — Black and white workers ate together, slept in the same dormitories, and sat in the same workshops. This was not incidental to Highlander's mission. Horton believed that racial division was the primary weapon that employers used to prevent working-class solidarity, and that any genuine labor education had to confront racism directly.

The coal operators and textile mill owners who learned about Highlander's activities responded with predictable hostility. Highlander was denounced as communist, subversive, and a threat to the social order of the South. Red-baiting — the accusation that Highlander was a front for communist infiltration — became a constant refrain, intensifying during the McCarthyist atmosphere of the 1950s.

The Civil Rights Transition

In the 1950s, Highlander shifted its primary focus from labor organizing to civil rights. The transition was organic rather than abrupt — Highlander had always been interracial, and the labor organizing workshops had always addressed racial inequality as part of the economic equation. But the rise of the civil rights movement gave Highlander a new and urgent mission.

Rosa Parks attended a Highlander workshop in the summer of 1955, just months before her refusal to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama, sparked the Montgomery bus boycott. Parks later described her Highlander experience as transformative: "At Highlander, I found out for the first time in my adult life that this could be a unified society, that there was such a thing as people of differing races and backgrounds meeting together in workshops and living together in peace and harmony."

Highlander hosted workshops that trained dozens of civil rights leaders. It developed the Citizenship Schools program — a literacy education initiative designed to help Black Southerners pass the voter registration literacy tests that were used to prevent them from voting. The Citizenship Schools, piloted on the South Carolina Sea Islands by Septima Clark and Bernice Robinson, spread across the South and became one of the most effective tools of the voter registration movement. The program was eventually transferred to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (Martin Luther King Jr.'s organization) and trained thousands of voter registration workers.

The State's Response

Tennessee authorities, under pressure from segregationist politicians and the coal and textile industries, attacked Highlander repeatedly. In 1959, the state revoked Highlander's charter and confiscated its property, ostensibly on charges of selling alcohol illegally and operating a school for "Negroes and whites" in violation of state segregation laws. The real reason, as everyone understood, was Highlander's role in the civil rights and labor movements.

Horton responded by reorganizing the institution as the Highlander Research and Education Center and relocating — first to Knoxville and eventually to New Market, Tennessee, where it continues to operate today. The state had seized the property. It could not seize the idea.

Highlander's legacy in Appalachian education is unique. It did not build schools. It did not train traditional teachers. It did not follow a curriculum approved by any state board of education. What it did was demonstrate that education could be a tool of liberation rather than a tool of conformity — that learning could empower people to change their circumstances rather than merely adapt to them. In a region where most educational institutions taught mountain people to be ashamed of who they were, Highlander taught them that they had the right — and the ability — to fight for something better.

Land-Grant Universities: Education for the State

The Morrill Act of 1862, signed by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, created the land-grant university system — a network of publicly funded institutions dedicated to practical education in agriculture, engineering, and the mechanical arts. In the Appalachian states, the land-grant universities became some of the most important educational institutions in the region, though their relationship with the mountain communities they served was not always straightforward.

Virginia Polytechnic Institute (now Virginia Tech), founded in 1872 in Blacksburg in the New River Valley — one of this textbook's anchor communities — grew from a small agricultural and mechanical college into a major research university. Its agricultural extension programs brought practical knowledge to farming communities across the Appalachian portions of Virginia. Its engineering programs trained generations of students who built the region's infrastructure. And its location in a mountain town — not in the state's tidewater or piedmont power centers — made it a genuinely Appalachian institution in ways that its founders may not have intended.

West Virginia University, founded in 1867 in Morgantown, served a state that was entirely Appalachian — the only state wholly contained within the Appalachian region. WVU's agricultural extension programs were particularly important in a state where farming remained a significant part of the economy well into the twentieth century. But WVU also served the coal industry, training mining engineers and geologists whose work facilitated the extraction that transformed the state. The university's relationship with the coal industry — as researcher, as workforce trainer, as occasional critic — mirrored the state's own complicated dependence on coal.

The University of Kentucky, though located in the Bluegrass region rather than the mountains, served a large number of Appalachian Kentucky students and developed significant programs in Appalachian studies, public health, and economic development focused on the eastern Kentucky coalfields. Its Robinson Scholars Program, created in 1987, provided full scholarships to students from the poorest counties in eastern Kentucky — a targeted intervention that sent hundreds of Appalachian students to the state's flagship university.

The land-grant universities opened pathways to higher education for thousands of Appalachian students who would not otherwise have had access. But they also, inevitably, drew students away from their home communities. A student who earned an engineering degree at Virginia Tech or a nursing degree at WVU faced a choice that millions of educated Appalachians have faced: return to a home community with limited opportunities, or stay in the wider world where the education they had worked so hard to earn could be fully utilized. The land-grant universities educated the mountains, and then, in many cases, the mountains lost the educated.

Coal Company Schools: Education Under Corporate Control

The settlement schools and Berea College were not the only educational institutions shaping mountain childhood in the early twentieth century. In the coalfield counties of West Virginia, Kentucky, and Virginia, the coal companies themselves operated schools — and the education those schools provided was shaped by the same corporate interests that controlled every other aspect of company town life (Chapter 16).

In the company towns that dominated the coalfields, the coal company owned the school building, hired the teachers, selected the curriculum, and paid the bills. This was not philanthropy. It was control. A company that owned the miner's house, the miner's store, and the miner's church was not going to leave the miner's children's education to chance.

The quality of company schools varied enormously. Some coal companies — particularly the larger, more paternalistic operations like U.S. Steel's subsidiary at Lynch in Harlan County, Kentucky — built substantial school buildings, hired qualified teachers, and provided educational resources that exceeded what the county public school system could offer. The company school at Lynch was, by many accounts, one of the best schools in eastern Kentucky, with solid facilities, a diverse student body (Lynch was a multi-ethnic coal town, as described in Chapter 19), and teachers who were paid better than their counterparts in the public system.

Other company schools were minimal — a single room in a building that doubled as a church or a meeting hall, staffed by whoever the company could hire cheaply, with a curriculum that emphasized obedience, punctuality, and the virtues of hard work. These schools were designed less to educate than to socialize — to produce the next generation of compliant workers who would enter the mines when they were old enough and who would understand that the company's authority was natural and benign.

The tension in company school education was the same tension that ran through every institution in the company town: the company provided services that would not otherwise have existed, but it provided them on its own terms and for its own purposes. A child educated in a company school received an education. But the education came with an implicit — and sometimes explicit — message: the company takes care of you. The company provides. The company knows best.

When the coal industry declined and the company towns dissolved, the company schools closed. The responsibility for educating coalfield children fell to county school systems that had been starved of resources for decades — because the coal companies had been providing educational services (however imperfectly) and the counties had not been required to build the capacity to replace them. The transition left gaps that, in some communities, were never filled.

The Foxfire Project: Students as Cultural Preservers

In 1966, a high school English teacher in Rabun Gap, Georgia — at the southern edge of the Appalachian mountains — tried something unusual. Eliot Wigginton was struggling to engage his students with the standard curriculum. They were bored. The textbooks were irrelevant to their lives. The standard essays and exercises felt disconnected from the world they inhabited.

So Wigginton proposed an alternative: instead of writing essays about distant topics, the students would interview their own grandparents, neighbors, and community elders about the traditional skills, knowledge, and stories that were in danger of being lost. They would transcribe the interviews, photograph the practices, and publish the results in a student-produced magazine. They called it Foxfire, after the bioluminescent fungus that glows in the Appalachian woods at night.

The first issue of the Foxfire magazine was modest — photocopied and stapled, distributed to the school and the local community. But the response was immediate and enthusiastic. The students had documented something that people cared about — the knowledge of hog butchering, log cabin construction, herb medicine, moonshine distilling, quilting, blacksmithing, and dozens of other traditional practices that the older generation possessed and the younger generation was at risk of losing.

The Foxfire magazine led to the Foxfire Book (1972), a commercial publication that became a surprise bestseller — selling millions of copies and spawning a series of eleven additional books. The Foxfire project became nationally famous as a model of experiential, community-based education.

The Foxfire approach inverted the settlement school model. Where the settlement schools had treated local culture as something to be replaced with "better" knowledge from outside, Foxfire treated local culture as the most valuable knowledge available — and the community's elders as the most important teachers. The students were not passive recipients of approved curriculum. They were researchers, documentarians, and cultural preservers. Their education was rooted in their place and their people.

The Foxfire model was widely replicated. Schools across Appalachia and beyond adopted similar approaches — student-produced publications documenting local culture, oral history projects, community-based research. The model demonstrated that education did not have to erase local identity. It could celebrate it. It could make students proud of where they came from rather than ashamed.

Wigginton's later personal controversies — he pleaded guilty in 1992 to child molestation charges — cast a shadow over the Foxfire project and raised painful questions about the separation of a pedagogical legacy from its founder's crimes. The Foxfire organization continued after Wigginton's removal, maintaining its educational mission and its commitment to cultural preservation. The pedagogical model — student-led, community-based, culturally grounded — remained valid regardless of the founder's failures.

Adult Literacy and the War on Poverty

The educational challenges in Appalachia were not limited to children. Throughout the twentieth century, significant numbers of Appalachian adults had limited literacy — a consequence of the inadequate educational infrastructure described earlier in this chapter. Men who had gone into the mines at fourteen or fifteen, women who had left school to raise families, older adults who had never had access to a school at all — all of these people lived with the daily consequences of limited literacy in a world that increasingly required the ability to read, write, and navigate complex bureaucratic systems.

The War on Poverty programs of the 1960s (Chapter 23) included significant investment in adult education in Appalachia. VISTA volunteers — the domestic equivalent of the Peace Corps — were deployed to mountain communities to conduct literacy programs, GED preparation classes, and adult basic education courses. The Appalachian Adult Education Center, established at Morehead State University in Kentucky in 1967, became a research and training hub for adult literacy efforts across the region.

These programs reached thousands of adults who had been bypassed by the educational system. The stories of adult literacy students were often deeply moving: a grandmother who learned to read at sixty-five and immediately read the Bible to her grandchildren for the first time. A miner who could finally read the safety notices posted in the mine. A woman who could read the labels on the medicine bottles that she had been guessing at for years.

But adult literacy programs also confronted the same tension that had characterized the settlement schools: the question of whose definition of literacy counted. The adults who could not read printed text were not illiterate in any absolute sense. Many were fluent in the oral traditions of their communities — storytelling, singing, preaching, and the vast body of practical knowledge that was transmitted through conversation and observation rather than through text. The literacy programs sometimes implied that non-literate adults were deficient, rather than recognizing that they possessed a different kind of literacy — one that the programs did not measure or value.

The most effective adult education programs — following the Highlander model described earlier — treated adult learners as knowledgeable people who possessed valuable experience and who were acquiring a new tool, not as empty vessels being filled with the knowledge they had been denied. The distinction was philosophical but also practical: adults who were treated with respect and whose existing knowledge was acknowledged were more likely to persist in literacy programs than those who were treated as remedial students.

The School Consolidation Wars

If the settlement schools were education imposed from outside, and Highlander was education from below, then school consolidation was education imposed from above — a policy driven by state legislatures, education bureaucrats, and efficiency experts that closed hundreds of small rural schools across Appalachia and replaced them with large consolidated facilities.

The consolidation movement was not unique to Appalachia. Across the United States, from the 1940s through the 1970s, the number of school districts declined dramatically as states pursued the consolidation of small, rural schools into larger, centralized facilities. The arguments were consistent: larger schools could offer broader curricula, hire more specialized teachers, provide better facilities (including gymnasiums, libraries, and science laboratories), and operate more efficiently — more students per dollar of public expenditure.

In Appalachia, the consolidation movement collided with geography and community identity in ways that the efficiency experts did not anticipate or did not care about.

The Geography Problem

The mountain topography that had created the hollow as the basic unit of Appalachian settlement (Chapter 1) also meant that travel distances between communities were far greater than they appeared on a flat map. A school that was "only" fifteen miles from a student's home might require a bus ride of an hour or more on narrow, winding mountain roads — roads that were often unpaved, frequently impassable in winter, and occasionally subject to flooding, rockslides, or washouts. Children who had walked ten minutes to a one-room school now rode a bus for hours each day.

The bus ride was not merely inconvenient. It was exhausting, sometimes dangerous, and it consumed hours that might otherwise have been spent studying, playing, or doing the farmwork that many families still depended on. Students who rode buses for two hours each morning arrived at school tired. Students who rode buses for two hours each evening arrived home in the dark, too exhausted for homework. The educational improvements that consolidation was supposed to deliver were, for many rural students, offset by the physical toll of getting to and from the consolidated school.

The Community Cost

But the deeper damage was not to individual students. It was to communities.

The one-room school had been, in many hollows, the social center of the community — the place where meetings were held, where celebrations occurred, where the community gathered as a community. Closing the school did not just move education to a different building. It removed the institution around which community life had organized itself for generations.

The pattern was documented by researchers who studied the consequences of school consolidation in Appalachian communities. When the school closed, other community functions that had been associated with it — PTA meetings, voting, community suppers, social gatherings — lost their anchor. Families who had been connected to the community through the school found that connection attenuated. Young families with school-age children, who might have stayed in the community if their children could walk to a local school, moved to be closer to the consolidated facility. The hollow's population declined. The community, already fragile, began to unravel.

In some cases, the closing of the school was the beginning of the end for the community itself. This was not an unintended consequence. It was a predictable one — predicted, in fact, by the communities that fought consolidation and were overruled by state education authorities who placed efficiency above community integrity.

Primary Source Excerpt — Testimony of Elaine Purkey, parent, at a West Virginia school consolidation hearing, 1968: "You tell us the new school will be better. It will have a gymnasium and a cafeteria and a library. We don't doubt that. But our school has something the new school cannot have. It has our children's grandparents living up the road. It has the creek where they play after school. It has the cemetery where their great-grandparents are buried. It has a teacher who knows every child by name and knows their parents and knows their grandparents. You cannot consolidate that. When you close this school, you don't just move the children. You break the community. And once it's broken, it won't come back."

The school was closed. The community did not come back.

Community Colleges: The Unsung Workhorses

If the settlement schools were romantic, the land-grant universities were prestigious, and Highlander was revolutionary, then the community colleges that spread across Appalachia in the 1960s and 1970s were practical. They were not glamorous. They were not the subject of documentary films or academic studies. They simply educated people — hundreds of thousands of people, generation after generation — who would not otherwise have had access to post-secondary education.

The community college system grew rapidly in the 1960s, fueled by federal funding (including War on Poverty programs described in Chapter 23) and state commitments to expand access to higher education. In Appalachia, community colleges were established in county seats and small towns across the region: Southern West Virginia Community and Technical College in the coalfields, Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College in Hazard and Cumberland, Wytheville Community College in the New River Valley of Virginia, and dozens of others.

These institutions served students who could not — for reasons of money, family obligation, geography, or academic preparation — attend four-year universities. They offered associate degrees, vocational certificates, and workforce training programs. They provided the first two years of college coursework for students who intended to transfer to four-year institutions. They offered GED programs for adults who had not completed high school. They operated evening and weekend classes for students who worked during the day.

The community colleges were, in many communities, the most accessible educational institutions available — the only post-secondary options within driving distance. For a single mother in McDowell County, West Virginia, a young man in Harlan County, Kentucky, or a laid-off miner in Wise County, Virginia, the local community college was not a second choice. It was the only choice.

And it worked. Research consistently demonstrated that community college attendance improved employment outcomes, increased earnings, and expanded opportunities for students in Appalachian communities. The community colleges did not produce the lawyers and doctors who left the region for urban careers. They produced the nurses, electricians, paramedics, dental hygienists, computer technicians, and small business owners who stayed and served.

Educational Attainment: The Data and the Story Behind It

The data on educational attainment in Appalachia tells a story of persistent gaps that have narrowed over time but have not closed.

The Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), which has tracked educational data across its designated counties since its founding in 1965, reports that Appalachian educational attainment has improved dramatically since the mid-twentieth century. In 1960, fewer than 30 percent of adults in the Appalachian region had completed high school. By 2020, the high school completion rate had risen to approximately 86 percent — still below the national average of 88 percent, but a remarkable improvement over six decades.

College attainment, however, tells a different story. As of 2020, approximately 24 percent of Appalachian adults held a bachelor's degree or higher, compared to approximately 33 percent nationally. The gap was widest in central Appalachia — the coalfield counties of West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and southwestern Virginia — where bachelor's degree attainment in some counties remained below 10 percent.

The numbers, however, do not tell the whole story. They do not tell you about the first-generation college student from a hollow in Mingo County who drives forty-five minutes each way to a community college while working part-time at a dollar store. They do not tell you about the teacher in a rural elementary school who spends her own money on classroom supplies because the county budget has been cut again. They do not tell you about the high school student with a 4.0 GPA who cannot take the AP courses that her peers in suburban schools take because her school cannot afford to offer them and cannot find teachers qualified to teach them.

The educational disparities in Appalachia are not the result of Appalachian people valuing education less. Survey data consistently shows that Appalachian parents value education at rates comparable to or higher than national averages. The disparities are the result of structural factors: funding inequities that tie school budgets to local property tax bases (ensuring that poor counties have poor schools), teacher shortages that leave rural schools unable to fill positions in mathematics, science, and special education, and geographic isolation that limits access to educational resources, libraries, and cultural institutions.

Contemporary Challenges: Broadband, Funding, and the Teacher Crisis

The twenty-first century has brought new challenges to Appalachian education — and exposed the persistence of old ones.

The digital divide became impossible to ignore during the COVID-19 pandemic, when schools across the country shifted to online learning. In urban and suburban communities, the transition was disruptive but feasible. In rural Appalachia, it was often impossible. Broadband internet access in many Appalachian counties remained far below national averages. Students were told to attend school online but had no internet connection at home. Families parked in fast-food restaurant lots to use the Wi-Fi so their children could attend class. School districts distributed mobile hotspots that worked intermittently, if at all, in mountain hollows where cell coverage was spotty.

The pandemic did not create the digital divide. It revealed it. And it revealed that the same geographic isolation that had made one-room schools necessary in the nineteenth century continued to shape educational access in the twenty-first.

Teacher shortages in rural Appalachian schools have reached crisis levels. Rural districts cannot compete with suburban and urban districts on salary, and the working conditions — large class sizes, limited resources, geographic isolation, and the emotional toll of serving communities under economic stress — drive high turnover rates. Mathematics, science, and special education positions are the hardest to fill. Some rural schools have resorted to long-term substitute teachers, virtual instruction from distant providers, or simply not offering courses that require specialized instructors.

Funding inequity remains the structural root of many of these problems. The American system of funding public schools primarily through local property taxes ensures that wealthy communities have well-funded schools and poor communities have poorly funded schools. In Appalachian counties where property values are depressed — often because the land has been stripped of its resources by the extraction industries described throughout this textbook — school budgets are chronically inadequate. State equalization formulas are supposed to compensate for these disparities, but in practice they rarely close the gap completely.

The Anchor Examples: Education's Arc

Harlan County, Kentucky experienced the full arc of Appalachian educational history: subscription schools in the nineteenth century, settlement school influence from Hindman and Pine Mountain, the dominance of coal company-funded schools during the coal era, the trauma of consolidation in the mid-twentieth century, and the contemporary challenges of educating children in a county whose economic base has collapsed. Harlan County's educational attainment data tracks the region's broader story — rising slowly from the depths but still below state and national averages.

The New River Valley, Virginia represents a different educational story — one shaped by the presence of Virginia Tech, which brought educational resources, employment, and cultural amenities that most Appalachian communities lacked. The contrast between educational outcomes in the New River Valley and those in the coalfields of southwestern Virginia, barely a hundred miles away, illustrates the transformative impact of anchor educational institutions — and the devastating consequences of their absence.

McDowell County, West Virginia is where the educational statistics are hardest to read. Bachelor's degree attainment in McDowell County has historically been among the lowest in the nation. The county has lost schools to consolidation and has struggled to attract and retain teachers. The educational challenges are inseparable from the economic ones: it is difficult to build a strong school system in a county that has lost more than 80 percent of its peak population and whose tax base has collapsed along with the coal industry.

Asheville, North Carolina offers a contrasting picture: a mountain community with relatively strong educational institutions, a growing economy that attracts educated workers, and proximity to the University of North Carolina system. Asheville's educational success, however, coexists with persistent disparities in the surrounding rural counties — a reminder that Appalachian educational outcomes vary enormously across short distances.

Community History Portfolio Checkpoint

For your selected Appalachian county, investigate the following:

1. School history. How many schools existed in your county at its peak? How many remain? Research the history of school consolidation in your county — which schools were closed, when, and under what circumstances. County historical societies, school board records, and local newspaper archives are primary sources.

2. Settlement school presence. Was there a settlement school or similar institution in or near your county? If so, what was its mission, who founded it, and what was its impact? If not, what educational institutions served the county in the early twentieth century?

3. Higher education access. What are the nearest community college and four-year university to your county? How far must a student travel to reach them? Has access to higher education changed over time — have institutions opened, closed, or changed their missions?

4. Educational attainment. Research the educational attainment data for your county using ARC or U.S. Census data. How does your county compare to state and national averages? How has attainment changed over time?

5. Contemporary challenges. What educational challenges does your county currently face? Teacher shortages? Funding gaps? Broadband access? Student transportation? Interview a teacher, school administrator, or parent if possible to get a ground-level perspective.

Write a 500-word assessment of education in your county across time, connecting the local story to the broader patterns described in this chapter.

Chapter Summary

Education in Appalachia has been a battleground — fought over by those who saw mountain people as problems to be fixed, those who saw them as citizens to be empowered, and those who saw them as communities to be consolidated out of existence.

The settlement schools of the early twentieth century brought genuine educational opportunity to communities that the public school system had neglected, but they also imposed middle-class cultural values that suppressed Appalachian language, music, and customs, teaching children to be ashamed of their own heritage. The Highlander Folk School offered a radical alternative — education as organizing, knowledge as power, the people closest to the problem as the best equipped to solve it — and trained leaders of both the labor and civil rights movements. Berea College and the land-grant universities opened pathways to higher education while drawing educated young people away from the communities that had produced them.

The school consolidation movement of the mid-twentieth century closed hundreds of small rural schools in the name of efficiency, destroying community social centers and imposing impossible transportation burdens on rural families. Community colleges emerged as the quiet workhorses of Appalachian education, serving the students who could not leave and providing the workforce that kept communities functioning.

The challenges that remain — funding inequity, teacher shortages, the digital divide, the persistent gap in college attainment — are not failures of Appalachian aspiration. They are failures of a system that has never adequately invested in the places where investment was needed most.

In the next chapter, we trace the thread of resistance that runs through all of Appalachian history — from Blair Mountain to Buffalo Creek to the Pittston Coal strike to contemporary climate activism — countering the persistent and pernicious myth that Appalachian people are passive victims who accept their fate without fighting back.