Commonwealth College was founded in 1923 at New Llano Cooperative Colony in Louisiana. The institution was relocated to Mena, Arkansas the following year. Mena is a city located in Polk County, Arkansas. ...
Commonwealth intended to recruit and educate people for leadership roles in a society where workers would play a central role in social and economic reform. While sharing goals with other schools like the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, Commonwealth College differed by offering a college-level curriculum. The founders wanted to create a laboratory with students and faculty sharing in the work needed to operate the institution. In 1932, Myles Horton and Don West founded the Highlander Folk School (later changed to the Highlander Research and Education Center) outside the town of Mounteagle in Grundy County, Tennessee in order to provide an educational center in the South for the training of rural and industrial leaders, and for...
Commonwealth became increasingly controversial and ultimately closed in 1941.
References
Koch, Raymond & Charlotte. Educational Commune: The Story of Commonwealth College. NY: Schocken Books. 1972.
External links
List of Other Arkansas Colleges that have Closed or Changed Their Names
Link to Manuscript Collections at the University of Arkansas
Orval Faubus was born near Combs in Madison County, Arkansas.
The 1954 election cycle was a bitter one and Faubus was forced to defend his attendance at a defunct northwest Arkansas school known as CommonwealthCollege, Arkansas as well as his early political upbringing.
CommonwealthCollege had been formed as a left-leaning college by academic and social activists, some of whom later were revealed to have had close ties with the American Communist Party.
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