Neoliberalism in East Alabama: Its Impact on “Lintheads” and Localities

John Gunn

Graduate Student in the Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology

The College of Agriculture, Auburn University, Alabama

***-***-**** or *******@auburn.edu

2 August 2014

Presented at the 77th Annual Meeting of the Rural Sociological Society

(Session 36 - Globalization, Economic Development and Community Transformations)

New Orleans, Louisiana

The use of “lintheads” is perhaps necessary to explain. Although a pejorative in the past

and undeniably still possessing some taint of classism, I use it as a term of endearment to

represent the traditional textile worker who might walk out a mill at the end of a shift with fiber

fragments on their clothing and body. For any offense, I apologize. 1

The Chattahoochee Valley towns of Lanett and Valley, Alabama and West Point, Georgia

are approximately thirty miles up Interstate 85 from Auburn University. Just to the north past the

West Point exit is a massive new Kia automotive plant. As is often now the case, substantial

incentives were doled out by state and local governments to land this industry and suppliers. 2

Yes, there was a nice new - and presumably quite costly - interstate exit specially built for this

“rebound” industry. 3 This easy access off the interstate from either the north or south may be

much more than just a road, as it seems symbolic of some of the change I explore.

We are all likely familiar with how textile manufacturing was lured South after the Civil

War and in the New South period by promises of low wages, docile labor and limited regulation.

4 However, what became the WestPoint Stevens (WPS) multinational started right there along

the Chattahoochee River with largely local investors and management. (Mock 2013)

1 Local character and author J. L. Strickland, a former employee of West Point Manufacturing even into the last

years of the company, applied the term on himself and his peers. Strickland, J. L. 2012. "A Natural-Born Linthead."

Southern Cultures 18(4):96-106.

2 Beyond tax abatements, infrastructure and other incentives, piritual forces were also credited for Kia, with a 65-

year-old lifelong resident named Annie Davidson briefly placing a ‘Thank You Jesus For Bringing Kia to Our

Town' sign in her yard. Luo, Michael. "A 'Heaven-Sent' Factory for a U.S. Town in Decline." Pp. 13 in The

International Herald-Tribune.

3 Additionally, a still small but growing private Christian college has selected Valley for its new home. Point

University, formerly known as Atlanta Christian College, purchased a large piece of property and some locals are

quite excited about this development. As is often the case, much of the faculty is also temp labor. Neoliberalism is

not merely for industry.

4 An early form of “corporate welfare” was demonstrated by the “boosterism” of politicians and other civic leaders

and offers to build factories and infrastructure. Local ministers were often preaching a gospel of laying up treasure

in heaven – but not here. Unions were generally, often violently, resisted by the owners and management. Often as

note, the press and power sided with the mills. Atkins, J.B. 2008. Covering for the Bosses: Labor and the Southern

Press: University Press of Mississippi.

The textile industry in the Chattahoochee Valley crumbled approximately a decade ago,

with shells of WPS factories still standing or only now being razed. 5 Before this, gradual

deskilling via technology first faced the workforce. For what it’s worth, Harry Braverman once

posited that expensive machinery may be easier to control than restive labor. (Anderson

2000:116)

The 1980s saw mergers, more reliance on automation and other technology, and a leaning

out of the supply chain. A more ‘just-in-time’ model boosted production and reduced

employment. (Anderson 2001:482) Consolidations continued in the textile industry. Flamboyant

financiers were soon jostling for WPS assets. Globalization loomed.

Employees and other in the community faced the resulting vacuum and economic

stressors. Some former and current workers saw stocks they were relying on for comfortable

futures fall rapidly in value. Being paid in stock shares as WPS struggled for survival makes

these losses even more notable. 6

Politicians and others in power forming alliances with mill ownership and other industrialists in the New South

period and beyond is reasonably established scholarship. Bartley, Numan V. 1982. "In Search of the New South:

Southern Politics after Reconstruction." Reviews in American History 10(4):150-63. Cobb, James C. 1988. "Beyond

Planters and Industrialists: A New Perspective on the New South." The Journal of Southern History 54(1):45-68.

The same abundance of scholarship applies as to paternalism in the southern textile towns.

Mill villages often had theaters, recreational facilities, stores and more surrounding company owned and controlled

housing.

5 In 1965, WPM merged with Pepperell Manufacturing Company dating back to Maine in 1850. In 1988, WestPoint

Pepperell acquired the bed and bath products arm of JP Stevens which can be traced back to 1813 in Massachusetts.

By 1993 the full merger of WestPoint Stevens was made complete. Thirty-three WPS plants were once located

inside the United States with a few more overseas.

6 The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation stepped in after the Chapter 11 Bankruptcy of WPS and covered a

shortfall of over a quarter of a billion dollars in the pension fund. I want to partly explore how people in the

community who might disparage the “fedril gubmint” approach this reality of ERISA.

Also, WPS was a publicly traded company. Corporate raiders like Bill Farley trying to displace the Lanier family

and the majority ownership had inflated WPS stock significantly.

The first Chattahoochee Valley textile mills, soon operating as West Point Manufacturing

Company (WPM), date back to just after the end of the Civil War. Generations of the Lanier

family controlled the company for well over a century with their complete, or essentially so,

ownership ending only in the late 1980s when a corporate raider named Bill Farley came calling.

7 This loss of control by the Lanier family began an approximate decade where financiers fought

over WPS.

Adding to this turmoil, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) passed in

1994. Globalization’s negative impact on the textile industry was anticipated by many, yet other

factors were already pressuring WPS and other interests engaged in textile manufacturing. 8

Dr. Linda Lobao’s piece in the new Rural Sociological Society decennial volume offers

us a framework. She writes, “Understanding the manner by which structural forces impact rural

people and communities is complex but critical for charting the nation’s future. Researchers must

generally grapple with four sets of processes pertaining to: (1) economic structure or shifts in

industries, firms, and jobs; (2) the state at all levels, important because rural livelihoods derive

not only from the private sector but also from government interventions; (3) institutionalized

7 William Farley was born in Chicago and was from working class roots. He earned an athletic scholarship to

Bowdoin College in Maine and a law degree from Boston College. Farley became a flamboyant takeover artist who,

in the late 1980s, swept into the Valley area promising salvation for WPS. “Little Bill’ or “The Underwear King”

(his entry into textiles was via acquiring Fruit-of-the Loom) as he would become known to some in the community,

was truly an outsider. He was the perfect foil for the Lanier family, although factions formed around each man.

Skrzycki, Cindy. 1990. "A Major Deal Maker of the '80s Is Drowning in Debt in the '90s." in The Washington Post.

Strickland, J. L. 2012. "A Natural-Born Linthead." Southern Cultures 18(4):96-106.

For current insight into Bill Farley, his own http://meetbillfarley.com/ illustrates his forward and self-promoting

style. Even into advanced age, he maintains his physical fitness and high style. I rather doubt many people in the

Chattahoochee Valley are consumers of his ‘Zrii’ health and wellness products.

8 In the early period of NAFTA’s implementation, using fabrics manufactured domestically allowed apparel

assembled abroad to receive favorably duty treatment. (Anderson 2001:481) This may have helped prop up some of

the textile industry. WPS was primarily doing bath and bed products in the Chattahoochee Valley area. (WPS sold

their Carolinas-based Alamac unit, where they manufactured apparel fabrics, in 1997.) It is clear that NAFTA

decimated the apparel manufacturing industry. Burfisher, Mary E, Sherman Robinson and Karen Thierfelder. 2001.

"The Impact of Nafta on the United States." The Journal of Economic Perspectives 15(1):125-44.

relationships between key social actors, such as relationships between employers-workers,

government-citizens, and civic society vis-à-vis government and business, with such

relationships reflecting bargaining power for valued societal resources; and (4) finally, spatial or

geographic processes, because the previous structural forces wash differentially across regions

and communities. These processes involving economic structure, the state, social actor

relationships, and geography vary across time impacting populations’ quality of life.”

(Lobao 2014)

Dr. Cynthia Anderson of Ohio University, focusing primarily of Kannapolis, North

Carolina where Cannon Mills was based, claims restructuring, globalization and spatialization

are one interdependent process rather than disjointed themes. She also suggests neither

paternalism nor structuralism is sufficient for studying social relations connected to the textile

industry of the recent past. (Anderson 2000:11,125) 9

9 This history of Kannapolis, North Carolina and Cannon Mills, Fieldcrest, Pillowtex … is remarkably similar to

what happened in the Chattahoochee Valley. What Bill Farley of WPS infamy did can be compared to what David

H. Murdock did as to Kannapolis. Like Valley, the incorporation of Kannapolis came in the 1980s only as the textile

industry started to wobble. “The Cannons has a reason for maintaining Kannapolis as an unincorporated town – they

could control entry of new manufacturers and therefore dominate the local labor market.” Anderson, Cynthia D.

2000. The Social Consequences of Economic Restructuring in the Textile Industry: Change in a Southern Mill

Village: Taylor & Francis. (Page 91)

Another similar study by historian Timothy Minchin ( at La Trobe in Victoria, Australia) on the closing of the

Crompton Company, allegedly the oldest weaving operation in the United States with plants then located in

Alabama, Arkansas, Virginia, Georgia and North Carolina, may be quite useful in setting up background and context

for the challenges facing WPS. Minchin, Timothy J. 2013. "The Crompton Closing: Imports and the Decline of

America's Oldest Textile Company." Journal of American Studies 47(1):231-60. Similarly, Dr. Minchin’s work on

the closing of the Pillowtex plant in Kannapolis, North Carolina is another useful piece. Minchin, Timothy J. 2009.

"'It Knocked This City to Its Knees': The Closure of Pillowtex Mills in Kannapolis, North Carolina and the Decline

of the Us Textile Industry." Labor History 50(3):287-311. Minchin’s study of when International Paper in Mobile,

Alabama closed might not relate to textiles and the town was hardly a single industry situation, but the piece covers

deindustrialization and demise quite thoroughly. It also scratches the surface of what has occurred in Alabama and

provides a useful bibliography. Minchin, Timothy J. 2006. ""Just Like a Death": The Closing of the International

Paper Company Mill in Mobile, Alabama, and the Deindustrialization of the South, 2000-2005." Alabama Review

59(1):44-77. I have not yet been able to obtain a copy of his new book, but it looks promising. Minchin, T.J. 2012.

Empty Mills: The Fight against Imports and the Decline of the U.S. Textile Industry: Rowman & Littlefield

Publishers.

What happened to people and institutions in this locale is presumably similar, at least in

part, to other “company towns” where a long existing industry has moved away or closed. 10 The

turmoil and stress associated with the last decade or so of WPS should also be relatively common

to other locations as manufacturing, especially textile, jobs hemorrhaged and neoliberalism

settled in as the dominant economic arrangement during late capitalism. What happened after

WPS closed may be somewhat unique to this community, however.

That difference is primarily because Kia and its suppliers are radically different than the

textile mills the Lanier men, and even Bill Farley, maintained. East literally came west. The

South Korean manufacturing model is very “lean.” Employees often commute in from larger

population centers down in Auburn or up in LaGrange, Georgia.11 Solidarity with one’s fellow

citizens seems all the less likely when a person is commuting to and from work. 12

Competition for jobs at Kia, and perhaps also its suppliers, is allegedly rather fierce. I

doubt many “lintheads” make the cut - especially at Kia and top tier suppliers. At the time of the

10 WPS was clearly a paternalistic employer and powerful player in local affairs. For instance, the City of Valley

only incorporated in 1980, having been formed from the mill villages of Fairfax, Langdale, Riverview, and

Shawmut. It was hardly uncommon for inter-generational owners/managers to work along inter-generational labor.

Managers at WPS were often very involved in local civic clubs and governing. WPM controlled the water and

sewage system, even generating power at one point. The way the time zones work is also notable in that both Valley

and Lanett still mostly operate on Eastern (one will hear it called “fast” among the locals) time as that is what

applied at the home office in West Point, Georgia.

11 Auburn’s K-12 public schools are considered among the best in Alabama. Some schools in the Troup County

(LaGrange, Georgia) system are also perceived as solid.

12 Citizens in the Chattahoochee Valley have been forced to deal with the “trend toward rapid deindustrialization and

catastrophic job loss” that is hardly uncommon. Sherman, J. 2009. Those Who Work, Those Who Don't: Poverty,

Morality, and Family in Rural America: University of Minnesota Press. (Page 29) Unlike the “Golden Valley” in

California which Dr. Sherman studied, this valley is hardly isolated. I hope to, in fact, locate information about

living patterns and other spatial data in human resource records or other sources.

announcement, Georgia’s then Labor Commissioner Michael Thurmond admitted the following:

“Not everyone will benefit unless they are educated, skilled or trainable." (Copeland) 13 14

Preliminary informant contacts and an analysis of media coverage in this locality indicate

that stress in this community has been significant in the post-Fordist era. 15 However, those most

often impacted by economic forces, trade policy, and financialization can probably count on their

local leaders, journalists and educators ignoring these structural changes. Criticism will likely be

essentially non-existent.

13 On a personal note, I have a family member with a bachelor’s degree in business logistics who is working at Kia.

He was originally on the floor assembly line but is now working in the repair shop. He has been approached about

entering their management track, but resists it as he fears he would work far more hours for perhaps less pay. Also, I

understand a fair number of the suppliers and perhaps even Kia tries to use temp or contract labor when that is

possible. This is quite the contrast for how WPM would supposedly offer college students work in a way where they

could go to school and still make a living. The paternalism of WPM was clearly a positive for many people in the

community.

14 As to the educated or trainable, those feeling it necessary to ratchet up their credentials in a hyper-competitive

world may find solace and/or empowerment in understanding how pressures in late capitalism impact their lives.

While “lifelong learning” and “learning organization” are not necessarily negative constructs to me, a person

embracing the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire might help students understand that individual efforts, or lack

thereof, might now always explain economic or social problems. Instead of “blaming the victim” for their troubles,

be it in obtaining a particular job or increasing their earnings via adding on education, critical pedagogy practice

might help a student move past economic entrepreneurialism and actually question management, plus other

mechanisms of control. Kopecký, Dušan. 2011. "Foucault, Governmentality, Neoliberalism and Adult Education -

Perspective on the Normalization of Social Risks." Journal of Pedagogy / Pedagogický Casopis 2(2):246-62. (Pages

255-257)

The worker in a neoliberal economy is often left precariously poised. These populations are often told to partner

with corporations and develop careers to fit in the new economy. Grace, André P. 2007. "Envisioning a Critical

Social Pedagogy of Learning and Work in a Contemporary Culture of Cyclical Lifelong Learning." Studies in

Continuing Education 29(1):85-103.

15 Access to informants and later snowballing prospects seems promising given some existing relationships and the

generally supportive reception the work has received up to this point. Although Dr. Conner Bailey has decent

connections, I taught at Long Cane Middle School near West Point from 2001-2005. I grew up and worked in my

early years in adjacent Randolph County. I was often in Chambers County in connection with my work. I have

family members with ties to the Chattahoochee Valley. In fact, my late father actually worked down in the WPM

mills at the start of WWII and even played football for Fob James, the father of the future Governor carrying his

same name. White, James. 2009. "Hollywood’s Reluctant Star: Forrest James " Alabama Heritage (Issue 93,

Summer 2009):44-50. Retrieved: July 27, 2014 (http://www.oursouthernliving.com/wp-content/uploads/Alabama-

Heritage-article.pdf ). I still know a fair number of locals and can speak of common experiences. I am still learning

mill language of weaving, doffing, and such but I don’t need to completely start from scratch.

Another different approach I use is to apply a Gramscian lens (with some Frankfurt

School critical theory sprinkled in) to this study. 16 17 I also believe that Zygmunt Bauman’s

“liquid modernity” or uncertainty applies to this community and neoliberalism as a whole. Henry

Giroux, citing Bauman, laments our increasing “pulverized, atomized society” that is “spattered

with the debris of broken inter-human bonds and their eminently frail and breakable substitutes.”

(Giroux 2011) 18 19

16 Truly, Gramsci is a favorite of social justice advocates and others working against hegemonic forces perpetuating

poverty and other harms from rapacious or merely unreliable capitalism. Baptist, W. and J. Rehmann. 2011.

Pedagogy of the Poor: Building the Movement to End Poverty: Teachers College Press, Teachers College, Columbia

University.

17 Adam David Morton, in Unraveling Gramsci, notes the application of Gramscian theory by Stephen Gill in

international relations and globalization. Morton, A.D. 2007. Unravelling Gramsci: Hegemony and Passive

Revolution in the Global Political Economy: Pluto Press. Applying Gramsci’s constructs beyond constraints of states

and borders seems highly possible. In fact, initial research indicates ripe fields in which to examine how former

WPS workers view those now manufacturing textiles abroad. One possible informant claims some community

members refuse to shop at the WestPoint Home (owned largely by another well known, perhaps even infamous,

corporate raider Carl Icahn) located off the interstate as a way to protest the plants closing and it selling foreign-

made products.

18 Regarding the term of neoliberalism, David Harvey’s book still stands. Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of

Neoliberalism: Oxford University Press. Additionally, the following works: “… neoliberal globalisation aims to

have ‘private capital and ‘the market’ alone determine the restructuring of economic, political and cultural life,

making alternative values or institutions subordinate’ … The flip-side of this project, though, is increasing

uncertainty, exclusion, marginalisation, alienation, and even destruction of the means of subsistence for much of the

global population.” Stephen, Matthew D. 2009. "Alter-Globalism as Counter-Hegemony: Evaluating the

'Postmodern Prince'." Globalizations 6(4):483-98. (Page 486)

19 If Kia’s model represents the liquid, WPM was solid or at least slurry. The way the communities around WPS saw

their social bonds break down, with recovery made more difficult by a fragmented and highly competitive world, is

likely supportable via Bauman and similar critics of a disjointed, fluid society where stability and rootedness is in

some respects seen as a liability. Similar themes in Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of

American Community” are present. (Putnam 2000) Less cohesion in a community, in some cases seriously regressed

from a “permanent impermanence” arising out of the neoliberal economy, appears to be a reality for many locales.

Bone, John David. 2010. "Irrational Capitalism: The Social Map, Neoliberalism and the Demodernization of the

West." Critical Sociology (Sage Publications, Ltd.) 36(5):717-40.

To couple this setting in the Chattahoochee Valley to Gramscian theory provides several

areas to study. Among them are if community members critically examined economic structures

and questioned aspects of late capitalism - especially neoliberalism. (Swanson 2008) 20 21

Work on “occupational communities” done by Auburn University’s very own Dr. Conner

Bailey from Rural Sociology and Dr. Crystal Lupo out of the School of Forestry and Wildlife

Science will be useful. Although perhaps not a perfect fit, especially into the last few years of

WPS, there can be little doubt that the closely packed mill villages, cotton mill culture and the

dominance of the Lanier family/WPS management in local affairs created “common norms,

values, work practices, and conceptions of identity closely related to work.” (Lupo and Bailey

2011:425)

20 “Gramsci breaks from economic determinism by arguing that hegemony does not flow automatically from the

economic positions of the dominant group, but it has to be constructed and negotiated and that it has to take into

account the interests of those groups over which it must be exercised.” Joseph, J. 2003. Social Theory: Conflict,

Cohesion and Consent: Edinburgh University Press. (Page 48)

21 Marx once wrote, “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production,

and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. … All fixed, fast-frozen

relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones

become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at

last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. The need of a

constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must

nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.” Tucker, R.C. 1978. The Marx-Engels

Reader: Norton. (Page 476)

How the Lanier family operated WPM was remarkably ossified for approximately a century. However, in the end of

the Fordist period, much “revolutionising” and sweeping away began. “Gramsci’s critical sociology attempts to

explain existing arrangements and socio-political institutions in terms of their historical conditions.”Salamini, L.

1981. The Sociology of Political Praxis: An Introduction to Gramsci's Theory: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Page 68)

Once Thatcherism took hold, this community made up for lost time. Our “lintheads” were surely “compelled to face

with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

The decline of the “mill villages” of the Chattahoochee Valley once owned and

maintained by WPM are also a significant transition for the community. I expect there is a fair

amount of scholarship on the insular world of mill villages yet I have yet to look. 22

Building off the work of Anthony Giddens, which I have yet to dive into, Dr. James R.

Dunn (University of Toronto) is concerned about existential anxiety and ontological security as

relates to the housing crisis flowing out of neoliberalism. Dunn often focuses on aging

populations and this surely applies to many citizens in the locale in which I’m working. People

in the Valley have already suffered from the machinations which financiers like Farley loosened

on WPS. The older “mill village” housing surrounding abandoned or razed mills remains a

visible reminder of WPS’s role in the Valley. (Dunn 2013) 23

As I am also doing graduate work in adult education, I will approach some of what

follows in that program. However, it is somewhat relevant and I think worth mentioning in this

context. “Schools transmit the dominant culture, habits of mind, and, perhaps most important of

all, they inculcate in a large portion of the society’s population the knowledge and values that

are deemed appropriate for citizenship within a given social formation.” (Aronowitz 2002:113)

Did the community’s educators and/or workers ever critically question deindustrialization

and neoliberalism, either as these plants were shuttered and in the subsequent decade? 24 Was

22 One area of which I was not aware, however, was the level of recreational sports the mill provided. Community

baseball teams, some even having semi-professional league status, existed in some of the larger textile towns. Some

of the better players were able to practice and play ball with jobs held for them once the ended.

23 One of the more interesting, at least to me, images I’ve captured in a photograph of the old Lanett mill being

demolished. It stretches for several blocks along the main road in Lanett leading into West Point. Across the street is

an equally massive empty parking lot. There’s a rusty sign out front with the iconic Pepperell Griffith featured. A

Komatsu (a company from Japan) track hoe is being used to rip down the old brick walls and scoop up the debris.

The closest restaurant that’s visible offers Mexican-themed food. Korean restaurants also are now rather common

along this interstate corridor.

24 Civil Society (the 2nd superstructure) is the consensus-creating elements of society that contribute to hegemony.

“Civil society is the sphere where capitalists, workers and others engage in political and ideological struggles and

where political parties, trade unions, religious bodies and a great variety of other organizations come into existence.

there any evidence of the “active self-dedication of a class to its own self-education?” (Morrow

and Torres 1995:266) 25

I also want see if any educators/intellectuals (using Gramsci’s broad inclusive definition

of the construct with both the traditional and “organic” intellectuals recognized) in the

community questioned power and privilege, whether at the local or national or even international

level, as well as the economic system. Among this group are certainly journalists and religious

leaders. (Mayo 2008) (Kopecký 2011) (Grace 2007)

In closing, to not attempt to capture insights into such a unique situation in the

Chattahoochee valley would be a shame. To begin to explore this event and help assemble the

record will potentially open the door for subsequent research efforts by sociologists, historians

and a range of other disciplines. The research might also have implications for making policy at

the local level and beyond. In addition, there is a potential for popularizing any findings down to

a non-scholarly audience. I am quite excited to begin informant interviews and locate records.

Questions and suggestions are welcome. A few copies of this paper are here, but I can

surely mail it to you or share where it is parked on Scribd and Dropbox. Thank you.

It is the not only the sphere of class struggles: it is also the sphere of popular-democratic struggles where arise out of

the ways in which people are grouped together – by sex, race, generation, local community, region, nation and son.

Thus it is in civil society that the struggle for hegemony between the two fundamental classes takes place.” Simon,

R. 2001. Gramsci's Political Thought: An Introduction: Electric Book Company. (Page 69)

To be clear, to question how modern capitalism operates does not require an explicitly Marxist orientation. Was

anyone in the Chattahoochee Valley area, whether grounded in Gramsci or not, acting as an intellectual in

“popularizing” critical questions about the economic and other forces behind the closing of the WPS mills? If so,

how did people in the community receive them? Hill, D.J. 2008. Hegemony and Education: Gramsci, Post-Marxism,

and Radical Democracy Revisited: Lexington Books. (Page 86) Alternatively, did any “traditional intellectuals” in

this community shift up to the level of “organic intellectuals” which endure and propagate – and can best help the

“subaltern” to access ‘the canon.’ Levinson, B. 2004. Market and Thought: Meditations on the Political and

Biopolitical: Fordham University Press. (Page 31)

25 I want to look for evidence of local learners developing their own appreciation of forces impacting not only their

lives but also that of others around them. Has it ever been that solidarity replaces competition? If so, when and how?

Is there any formal learning that is not about climbing a ladder and more about maturing?

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Mississippi.

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