12+ Myles Horton Quotes On Friendship, Nature And Paulo Freire

Myles Horton was an American educator, social activist, and leader in the adult education movement. He founded the Highlander Folk School in 1932, a social justice training center in Tennessee, to help people learn how to organize for social change. Horton was a major influence in the civil rights movement, helping to train activists such as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Myles Horton on love, life, friendship.

I think if I had to put a finger on what I consider a good education, a good radical education, it wouldn't be anything about methods or techniques. It would be loving people first. — Myles Horton

Any decent society has to be built on trust and love and the intelligent use of information and feelings. Education involves being able to practice those things as you struggle to build a decent society that can be nonviolent. — Myles Horton

If you only try to do the things where you win, then you'll never try to do anything worth doing. — Myles Horton

You can't be a revolutionary, you can't want to change society if you don't love people, there's no point in it. — Myles Horton

I’m much better at working out ideas in action than I am in theorizing about it and then transferring my thinking to action. I don’t work that way. I work with tentative ideas and I experiment and then with that experimentation in action, I finally come to the conclusions about what I think is the right way to do it. — Myles Horton

I'm as proud of my inconsistencies as I am my consistencies. — Myles Horton

Instead of thinking that you put pieces together that will add up to a whole, I think you have to start with the premise that they're already together and you try to keep from destroying life by segmenting it, overorganizing it and dehumanizing it. You try to keep things together. The educative process must be organic, and not an assortment of unrelated methods and ideas. — Myles Horton

I also knew that if people have a position on something and you try to argue them into changing it, you’re going to strengthen that position. If you want to change people’s ideas, you shouldn’t try to convince them intellectually. What you need to do is get them into a situation where they’ll have to act on ideas not argue about them. — Myles Horton

Curiosity is very important I think, and I think too much of education, starting with childhood education, is either designed to kill curiosity or it works out that way anyway. — Myles Horton

You can padlock a building, but you can't padlock an idea. — Myles Horton

Nothing will change until we change - until we throw off our dependence and act for ourselves. — Myles Horton

When people criticize me for not having any respect for existing structures and institutions, I protest. I say I give institutions and structures and traditions all the respect that I think they deserve. That's usually mighty little, but there are things that I do respect. They have to earn that respect. They have to earn it by serving people. They don't earn it just by age or legality or tradition. — Myles Horton

Life Lessons by Myles Horton

Myles Horton taught that education should be used to empower marginalized communities and to challenge oppressive systems. He showed that education can be used to foster social change and to create a more just society. He also demonstrated the importance of teaching critical thinking skills and the value of experiential learning.