Twenty-five years ago Eugene Haberman, just graduated from Pennsylvania University, went hunting geological specimens. In Highlands, North Carolina, then 40 miles from any railroad, he suddenly felt a passion for that most vague and most real thing known to men, which we call Home. He settled. He located an experimental school, where for 10 years he worked as an unknown forerunner of Professor John Dewey. It was a pay school, though Haberman did most of the paying, and he ran a country printing press for a living. He built on the doctrine of interest, of group effort and self-building through communal work. He exploited the local environment. I first meant Haberman, an elderly man now, among his pupils who had grown to be men. He was leading a discussion of national economic policies from where he sat on a cracker box in the general store of Highlands. That store was a community center, and Haberman’s school was a community center.
--John Collier, in Hanifan’s Community Center
From The University of North Carolina News Letter, Chapel Hill, N.C., June 15, 1921
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