Progressive education and modernist literature: Black Mountain College, 1933-1940

Black Mountain College (1933–57) is famous for the creative artists who taught and studied there. But behind its celebrated alumni was a modernist institution, whose liberal arts curriculum entwined modernist aesthetics with progressive principles developed from John Dewey. Under John Andrew Rice's pioneering leadership, Black Mountain College began to work out a democratic pedagogy of creative experience quite different from most other US institutions of Higher Education. Modernist principles of method informed the entire teaching situation and the relations between students and staff, rather than just being studied inside discrete textual objects