Career
Judith and Herbert Kohl's first book, The View from the Oak: The Private World of Other Creatures, introduces readers to the world of animals by discussing how they see, feel, navigate, and think. The prize-winning book fathoms what a flower looks like to a bee, why a snake tracks incremental temperature changes, and how spiders experience space, and also, it includes interactive games. In Kohl's second collaborative effort, Pack, Band, and Colony: The World of Social Animals, they deal with how three groups of social animals, wolves, lemurs, and termites, behave within their own set of social rules.
Judith Kohl and her husband teamed with groundbreaking educator Myles Horton to write Horton's autobiography, the son of a Tennessee farmer and a teacher, recounting his life story over several years leading up to his death in January of 1990, titled The Long Haul. Greatly influenced by the different types of education in his life, Horton attended Tennessee's Cumberland Presbyterian College and then went on to Union Theological Seminary in New York City. In both places, he became involved with socialist ideals, particularly the causes of racial equity and labor unions. Horton brought these ideas back to Tennessee and set up the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle in 1932. The school stressed labor theory, economics, and local Appalachian culture, but the main focus was on hands-on learning, the curriculum controlled by the students.
After World War II, Horton struggled to keep the school open. His formerly beneficial relationship with the Congress of Industrial Organizations ended when that organization curtailed its support of the expansion of industrial unionism. Highlander also suffered as a result of its socialist leanings and its participation in the civil rights movement. Among those individuals who were involved in the school and its teachings were Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Eleanor Roosevelt, Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie. The school continued to survive, despite two location changes and a name change. In 2002 it operated as the Highlander Research and Education Center.
