“starting life again”: School and community at arthurdale (U.S. 1934–1936)

Abstract

In the 1930s, American educators and policymakers created Arthurdale, West Virginia as a resettlement community for miners and their families who had been driven into poverty by declining coal production. Arthurdale was a landmark in efforts to bring Deweyan ideals of progressive education to bear on community life and in so doing to revitalize the lives of the victims of economic collapse. By focusing students’ lessons on the ongoing life of the emerging community, Arthurdale’s schools offered a rich and humane education in which collective problem solving was the essence of democratic learning and life. Still, this chapter argues, the very way progressive educators focused on the problems of daily living obscured the class and race divisions that shaped Arthurdale and American society in general. In this Arthurdale epitomized wider contradictions in community-centered progressive pedagogy as of form of liberatory education for working-class youth.