On the one hand, what modern microcolleges and living-learning institutes are doing is not so unprecedented. They draw from a long legacy of sibling and predecessor educational projects which, using similar core programmatic elements, have documented track records of impact.
On the other, it is new; bringing the best of these influential institutions’ approaches into conversation to create something entirely more than the sum of its parts.
These legacy institutions offer evidence of the potential of this current movement. This approach to education has legs. We’ve seen what it can occasion for students, and modern institutions benefit from their lessons learned.
Berea College, a member of the growing Work College Consortium, recently published findings demonstrating the impact of labor as a pedagogical tool on students’ sense of self-efficacy and meaning-making. The student impact of the former Black Mountain College (which employed shared community governance, and a hallmark design-and-build labor program) has been the subject of an extensive work of history that names it as “one of the most important artistic and intellectual communities of the 20th century”, and continues to capture the imagination of the modern public. The impact of Deep Springs College (perhaps the most direct inspiration for modern microcolleges, and the first to develop the three-pillared model of academic, labor, and self-governance) can be read in an alumni impact research report conducted by L. Jackson Newell. The report describes the positive effect of a Deep Springs education on alumni’s “sense of the duty to invest their talents toward humane or public ends”. Moreover, Deep Springs offers direct evidence of the long-term sustainability and success for micro-models. It is one of the most selective institutions of higher education in the country, has a large enough endowment to be tuition-free, and consistently produces alumni dedicated to lives of service who go on to make extraordinary imprints on the world.
In terms of demonstrated large-scale impact, one of the most compelling analog movements can be seen in the Scandinavian Folk Schools of the 1840’s. Similar to the institutes highlighted in this paper, Folk Schools were also small, interdependent living-learning communities in rural areas that integrated intellectual and physical work through embodied labor and a highly place-specific humanities curriculum.
Folk Schools sought to equip young leaders with the self-authorship, belonging, and sense of responsibility to meet a time of unprecedented political change and social modernization in Denmark. And as Lene Rachel Anderson describes in her book, The Nordic Secret; Folk Schools worked. They are largely credited with catalyzing profound civic and cultural transformation (including by federal reports) for Denmark’s successful transition to democracy.
Folk schools were founded on the German educational philosophy of bildung, which is an earnest mirror to the mission of living-learning institutes as well as the mechanisms to achieve it. Bildung is a concept of seeing yourself as a “node in a network of selves, and thus learning mutuality and holistic thinking”. Through embodied work and labor practices students at Folk Schools “built a sense of accomplishment and an ‘I can do stuff’ mentality”. Students came home from Folk Schools with a sense of direction and purpose, and the agency and self-efficacy to act on it. They developed the internal mindsets and practical toolkits that “are not optional extras for the transition to a better world” but necessary for it.