Cool! I remember these books from my youth, my parents having had them in their library. These are a couple of the once well-known Foxfire books, a series of 12 anthologies published in the 1970s, from articles published in the Foxfire magazine. I borrowed these from my Mom.
Wikipedia describes the series;
The Foxfire magazine began in 1966, written and published as a quarterly American magazine by students at Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School, a private secondary education school located in the U.S. state of Georgia. An example of experiential education, the magazine had articles based on the students' interviews with local people about aspects and practices in Appalachian culture. They captured oral history, craft traditions, and other material about the culture. When the articles were collected and published in book form in 1972, it became a surprising best-seller nationally and gained attention for the Foxfire project.
I remember being fascinated with the articles and the Foxfire project itself. It's an entirely different educational paradigm from what we see in most institutional schools (public or private) that is based on learning traditions, history and culture first-hand (or as close as possible) from previous generations.
The Foxfire books are still as helpful as ever for learning how to, for instance, build a log cabin or butcher a hog (though one could recently have learned a good deal about hog butchering just from reading Gilbert magazine!). They would no longer be the best resource for this kind of knowledge, however, since we have the internet, now, and through it a whole universe of useful, esoteric information. I've gone to the internet recently to get instruction on everything from knife-sharpening to fixing our washing machine. Video makes these things that much easier to learn, too. But the books are still neat and fun to browse. The article format makes them great for bedtime reading, and the whole outlook of the books makes them inspirational. Seems like they would be a great supplement for home-schoolers or scouts.
Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. - G.K. Chersterton, The Observer, 1924
(NOTE: Foxfire is not to be confused either Firefox, the popular internet browser, or Firefox Starfox, the awesome video game, wherein I beat the evil Andross and saved the entire Lylat system. You're welcome...).
Recent Comments