“We have always been primarily a school. It is book-learning our children have come for, and book-learning that has explained Pine Mountain to the countryside. The life of the school adjusted itself around lessons even in days when the most important thing in the world seemed to be to get the food cooked, the clothes washed, fires built, corn hoed, buildings built. We did not wait for a schoolhouse to begin teaching; the House in the Woods took care of the children till snowfall, until 1918, when they were distributed in the living rooms of various cottages; or, the first three years at the Masonic Lodge over Mr. Nolan’s store. The day after the new Mary Sinclair Burkham Schoolhouse burned to the ground, classes were resumed in any odd corner of the grounds that was available. Study hour, from the very beginning, was impressed upon us as a sacred thing…”

As the School evolved, the idea of what constituted a well-educated individual also evolved. The concept of a work-study program was in place from the very beginning of the School when Uncle Wiliam Creech saw an educational plan serving the entire surrounding community. Katherine Pettit, as Mary Rogers in her History of Pine Mountain Settlement School noted, was interested in traditional schooling but

“… she [Katherine Pettit] envisaged also a settlement serving a whole community in its economic, health and cultural development. A settlement would not attempt to substitute an outside culture for the indigenous. It would try to strengthen people’s faith in their own heritage, making use of both the mountain environment and their unique traditions as media for learning. It would help people to retain a secure sense of their own worth as human beings.”

Print Shop, c. 1942: Student at printing press (1). Harmon Fdn. movie still. [pm_harm_094.jpg]

A work program always accompanied the traditional educational curriculum even in the earliest years. And, as the school moved into the industrial age, the idea of an industrial education grew. Staff and students shared in the work program and a job well done was measured by an individual assessment of work well done (or, not) and entered into the student record. Uncle William, one of the School’s founders, had said to Pettit and deLong when they came to build the School that “It’s good for folkses’ characters to work with their hands.” The building of character through manual labor also meant learning to work together and in the 1930s and 1940s the introduction of a co-op module in the second year of study assured students of an experience working within a consumer’s cooperative. The Co-Operative Movement was worldwide and the elements of this consumer cooperation were studied from an international perspective. In the third year of their high school curriculum of the 1930s and 40s, the students focused on the surrounding community. The educational module looked at the settlement movement and its origins and how early work in urban settlement environments could be adapted to the rural community. The community groups under supervision visited in the nearby homes and offered basic hygiene, nursing, and literacy and recreation to their neighbors.

Pine Mountain Settlement School PMSS SERIES IV – LIBRARY FILE, 1911-1983, 1983-present Series IV: LIBRARY FILE, 1911-1983
[Originally boxed 55 –]