“From Liberal Experiment to Socialist Pedagogy: The Syllabus at Black Mountain College”
Matthew Holman, University of Hertfordshire
Tuesday 3 February. 4-6pm
Highfield House, A02
This paper reconsiders the syllabus at Black Mountain College (1933–1957) as a document of socialist pedagogy and collective labour. Founded in North Carolina as an experiment in democratic education, the College has often been celebrated in liberal terms—as a haven of individual creativity and freedom, with arch liberal educational reformer John Dewey’s ideas as its intellectual foundation. My contribution challenges this dominant reading by foregrounding its socialist dimensions: the integration of shared labour, communal governance, and collective art-making into a single curricular form, while also developing recent scholarship (Silver, 2024) on the significance of the College farm and its agrarian and self-sufficient aspirations. Drawing on surviving syllabi, work-program records, and archival correspondence, I argue that Black Mountain reimagined the syllabus as a social contract on socialist and communitarian principles rather than an administrative instrument. Courses in art, design, and music were inseparable from daily manual labour—building, farming, and maintaining the college itself. This structure reflected a materialist understanding of education rooted in Marxist and Bauhaus ideals: that labour is creative, and that the work of learning is inherently collective. By reading the syllabus as both pedagogical plan and political text, the paper situates Black Mountain within a transatlantic history of socialist educational experiments. Ultimately envisaged as part of a book on radical art schools, I argue that the College’s curricular form enacted, rather than merely described, its egalitarian principles.
Matthew Holman is Lecturer in Literature and Fine Art at the University of Hertfordshire. A specialist in American modernism, Matthew holds a PhD in cultural history from University College London and has been a research or postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Courtauld Institute, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies in Berlin. His first full-length book, 'Frank O’Hara & MoMA: New York Poet, Global Curator', was published by Bloomsbury in September 2025, and he is currently working on a new book project on the history of radical art schools.
This talk is part of the 2025-26 CRVC research theme The Art of the Syllabus.