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MONTEAGLE TENNESSEE The Setting. The Highlander Folk School is located on the tip of the Cumberland Mountains in the Tennessee Valley Authority region. The School is centrally situated in the southern indue- trial area. The Need. The people of the South lack experience in industrial organization. They want to learn how to adjust to the change from rural to industrial Jife, and how to face the problem of improving their economic and social conditions. In these times, when all the enlightened forces of capital and labor are needed to “make democracy work,” the building of responsible Jabor leadership is imperative. Southern workers in particular have Jacked opportunities for education. By becom- ing informed and trained union members they can help achieve in the South the industrial democracy so vital to the progress of the whole country. Founding ef the School. In 1932, Myles Horton, a native Tennessean educated at Cumberland University and the Uni- versity of Chicago, returned to Tennessee to help provide Southern workers with an oportunity for an education fitted to their practical needs. Highlander Fotk School was therefore founded “to provide an educational center in the South for the training of rural and industrial leaders, and for the conservation and enrichment of the indigenous cultural vahaes of the mountain.” Throughout the eight years of the school’s existence, it haa functioned along these broad lines: it is a local rural settle- ment house serving the community and county; and it is a center for the education and development of intelligent labor leadership throughout the entire South. Through this program, the school hopes to aasist in bringing Mountaineer student now about the economic and political de- active in community co- mocracy that is the heritage of the Operative, finest American tradition,