But I still do think from time to time about this man and his work— and the circumstances that overshadow his accomplishments. In November , forty-nine-year-old Eliot Wigginton plead guilty to one count of child molestation for fondling a ten-year-old boy. The matter of his small-town English teacher was covered by The New York Times , which explained summarily what Foxfire was:.
Named for a phosphorescent lichen common to the mountainous north Georgia area, Foxfire began as a student-produced journal in Mr. It sent the students out to interview their neighbors and examine their communities and eventually grew to an enterprise that sold more than four million books worldwide, inspired a Broadway play and a created a network of more than 1, teachers in about a dozen states who actively promote the idea of the journals as learning tools.
Wigginton was seen by many as the embodiment of this experiential approach to learning. In he received one of the so-called genius grants from the John D. MacArthur Foundation. The writer, Debra Viadero, recounts the increasing severity of the accusations against this once-lauded teacher:. All of the accolades stopped two years ago, however, after a year-old boy from Athens, Ga. Soon after that news broke, other young men began to come forward.
They said they, too, had been molested by Wigginton when they were teenagers, and their stories were remarkably similar. By the time the case brought by the Athens boy was scheduled to go to trial, a total of 18 young men were prepared to testify that Wigginton had molested them — or had attempted to — on 23 separate occasions. Viadero also interviewed Wigginton himself for her article. About any attempt to draw connections between his teaching and his crimes, he had this to say:.
And no teacher is immune from the scrutiny that comes with crossing it. Beyond that though, another theme has to be acknowledged: the verve with which so many people — educators and students alike — recognized the value of experiential learning.
It was built on getting students into the community, where they were encouraged to understand and appreciate their own natural and cultural surroundings, and write about it. That approach invests everyone in the education of children, from parents to. No amount of dollars, nor any computer-based program will ever accomplish what human beings working together can accomplish. Today, The Foxfire Fund, Inc. He was a kind of escape for us. We got to do fun things, and the attitude was that if I say anything, all this will be taken away.
So we just tried to warn each other. We were protecting Foxfire. Even Tommy Wilson came back to Foxfire. In , the summer after he had first tried to warn others of Wigginton, he returned from college to work full time restoring a gristmill and other log structures on Foxfire property.
One day, he and Eliot had to drive out to the country to pick up a loom. A young boy had procured it for Foxfire studies and had it waiting for them. Eliot was grateful. A few days later, Tommy started his morning drive up Black Rock Mountain to begin work on the gristmill.
In a flash of anger and disgust, he turned his truck around and never went back. Foxfire publications, on the other hand, garnered widespread respect for the mountain lifestyle. How to make a whimmy diddle or a rabbit box or a gristmill with oak cogs was once again valuable information. Elders who possessed this vanishing knowledge were dignified by it.
Kids respected them, and wanted to help preserve it. To that extent, Foxfire was becoming intimately identified with Rabun County. Thus, if Wigginton was living a lie, many others in Rabun County and in the Foxfire network were at the very least avoiding the truth.
In , four male students confronted Wig with a molestation and made him promise he would never do it again. By early last November, he said, one still did.
On another occasion, McCollum says, some boys assaulted Wigginton. I alluded to it, yes, but I felt in my heart he knew what I was talking about. How could they not? They knew everything else that was going on. I had someone who was an employee of Foxfire tell me that he was a known homosexual, but they would not do anything about it because he brought so much revenue into Rabun County. A victim went to two Foxfire employees with his story, according to Jay McCollum. Another man says that he related his molestation to an acquaintance who later became the director of endowments for a Foxfire Fund corporate benefactor.
The statute of limitations had also run out. The investigation was dropped. And I think people still have rights unless you can back it up. And then there was scattered suspicion and rumor: that Wig had once been beaten up by the father of a boy whom he molested, that another boy had gone to a football coach, that Wig, who turned 50 late last year and had never married, was homosexual, asexual, creepy.
But a disturbing social conundrum remains. There may have been people who could have acted more forcefully on what they heard. Notice the word heard. But we are as interested in finding that out as anyone. And number two, the very nature of the alleged acts is private, secluded, occasional and shameful. Eliot Wigginton was going to trial, and former male students from as far away as Texas and California were ready to testify against him.
McCollum had their rooms waiting. One of the boys had returned in an unexplainably hostile mood. Wigginton took a polygraph test. He passed it. And even though Sheriff Don Page warned Wigginton and his attorney months before his criminal indictment that he felt if there was anything to the Athens allegation, others would come forward, Eliot Wigginton shouted from the highest mountaintop: I did not do this!
Over 26 years, his stature in the community had become almost baronial. And after all, former victims had long gambled with their own consciences, compounding guilt they probably already felt for putting themselves in that situation, guilt for being minors involved with drugs and alcohol, guilt for not bringing this out years earlier, guilt involving their own sexuality and manhood. He might have also reasoned that The Foxfire Fund administrators knew nothing of his behavior.
There were letters of support by the dozens, and scores of kids who could say that they had travelled thousands of miles with Wig and never had a problem. All those bad things, they were history now, wounds surely long since healed. Most former victims, in fact, had come to their own personal resolutions in their 20s and 30s. One day, in the course of an otherwise ordinary conversation, the guardian mentioned that they would be filing suit against a well-known educator in Rabun County.
The single most disturbing fact was that the Athens boy was only years-old. Wigginton offers no clues to the origins of his problem. All of the accolades stopped two years ago, however, after a year-old boy from Athens, Ga.
Soon after that news broke, other young men began to come forward. They said they, too, had been molested by Wigginton when they were teenagers, and their stories were remarkably similar. By the time the case brought by the Athens boy was scheduled to go to trial, a total of 18 young men were prepared to testify that Wigginton had molested them—or had attempted to—on 23 separate occasions. Faced with that litany of accusations, Wigginton on Nov.
A judge, after giving the educator one last night to have dinner with his father, ordered him to report to the jail the next day to begin serving his month sentence. The whole messy affair rocked this small, conservative community, where churches seem to spring up at every bend of the winding mountain roads.
The news also sent shockwaves through the education world, where Wigginton had earned a reputation as a respected writer and teacher-reformer in the model of a Pat Conroy or a Jonathan Kozol.
And it devastated the Foxfire organization, which had grown up under his nurturance. Under the terms of his sentence, he is barred from working with children for 20 years. As Eliot Wigginton prepares to walk out of jail a free man—at least in a physical sense he was released Nov.
And can Foxfire thrive without him? Clad in faded jeans, his shirt sleeves rolled up, Wigginton looks every bit the reformer whose photos appear in Foxfire publications.
He has the same round glasses, long buckteeth, and tall, lanky frame that have become almost trademarks for him. At 6 feet 1 inch and pounds, he is impossibly thin.
The face may be more lined than the early photographs suggest, but, in truth, Wigginton, at 52, is still somewhat boyish-looking as he sits with his long legs casually sprawled. The voice, in contrast to the informal image he projects, is deep and resonant, and his words often are eloquent. What I knew, I knew, and what I now know, I know in spades. For all his time in jail, however, Wigginton is less clear about the crime that put him here.
He is prohibited, under the terms of his sentence, from denying that he molested the Athens 5th grader. Today, outside the courthouse, he seems more remorseful, offering these words for the colleagues and friends who are still struggling to figure out how the Eliot Wigginton they knew—the educator so unselfishly devoted to the profession—could have done something so wrong, so potentially damaging to a child psychologically.
Already a slow and thoughtful speaker, Wigginton takes an extra moment to puff on a cigarette and to regard the passing cars. I deserve that. There are no signs directing tourists from the main highway to the center.
But visitors still manage to find their way up the mountain, past the Blue Hill Baptist Church and the Mountain City Church of God, past the few mongrel dogs that inevitably nap in the street, to the dusty, narrow road that leads to the center.
There are 15 log-and-clay structures scattered among tulip poplars. Some of them are more than years old. Students, working with Foxfire educators, painstakingly disassembled the once-crumbling buildings, moved them from their original sites, and reassembled them here. Partially hidden by trees, the empty six-sided structure sits atop the complex and overlooks the neighboring mountains. Wigginton has been drawn to this section of northeastern Georgia since childhood.
His widowed father, a former professor of landscape architecture at the University of Georgia, frequently took his son to Rabun County on visits. Almost 60 percent of the county is covered by national forests. And the vacationers who come to enjoy its mist-shrouded hills, lakes, and waterfalls cause the local population of more than 11, to double and triple during the summertime.
But Rabun County today is neither the redneck territory of Deliverance nor the isolated, rural community Wigginton encountered when he first began teaching here in Now, teenage boys do their hunting in the morning before school, and their fathers are more likely to work in textile mills than on farms.
Fresh out of Cornell University in Ithaca, N. His classes were a mixture of boarding students, many from troubled homes, and local public school students for whom there was no room at the high school. The local students were more interested in showing off their cars, hunting, and socializing than they were in Shakespeare, and there was friction between them and the boarding students, who were almost never let off the campus. Once, some boys set fire to his lectern.
Thus, Foxfire was born. Named after a glowing fungus that grows in the damp woods of these mountains, Foxfire magazine at first offered a mixture of poetry and journalistic pieces centered on local folklore and practices. Students went out into the community and interviewed old people. Then they came back and wrote about everything from hog dressing to how to plant crops by the signs of the zodiac. The best of the articles were then compiled in a series of 10 books published by Doubleday.
The first book of the series, The Foxfire Book , is now in its 47th printing and has sold more than 4 million copies. Some of the profits reaped went into the creation of the Foxfire complex. Other funds were plowed into ill-fated community development projects and into scholarships and summer work programs for students. And Foxfire Fund Inc. Over the years, students working with Foxfire educators have produced record albums, run a blacksmith shop, and formed a string band, among other ventures.
There were also experiments with outdoor and environmental education classes. In , Wigginton published Sometimes a Shining Moment , the semiautobiographical book that attempted to synthesize what he had learned about teaching through those experiences. Teaching, after all, was what Foxfire—the magazine, the books, the string band, and the many other activities—was all about.
Out of it had sprung a pedagogy. That pedagogy held that students learn best when they are engaged in meaningful activities that they choose themselves. What do people do with it in the real world? The really perverse beauty of the philosophy is that it appears to the initiate to be crazy.
The principles were not entirely new. Education philosopher John Dewey had said much the same thing more than 60 years earlier. But Wigginton, who had come to his conclusions on his own, expanded on them in a way that made sense for the average classroom teacher. Now, there are 13 Foxfire teacher networks in states across the country—four more are pending—and an estimated 2, teachers call themselves Foxfire teachers. By this time, Wigginton, always somewhat distant from his colleagues, had become a remote figure to the central organization in Mountain City.
He was teaching an educational-foundations class at the University of Georgia in his hometown of Athens. As part of that arrangement, he taught in the mornings at Chase Street Elementary School, a school he had attended as a boy.
Chase Street was becoming a Foxfire demonstration school, and Wigginton was there to help guide it along. In the afternoons, he taught English to Athens high school students. He had taken an apartment in Athens and was commuting plus miles to his cabin on Black Rock Mountain on weekends. The 5th grader who accused Wigginton of molesting him had been one of his students at Chase Street.
That in itself was not unusual. Students often accompanied Wigginton to such Foxfire events, where they were asked to describe their classroom projects. In fact, Wigginton had made it a policy not to accept out-of-town speaking engagements unless students were invited to go along and make their own presentations.
Jack says the boy returned home the next day in a sullen and angry mood. When word of the inquiry leaked, Wigginton put out a press release denying the charges.
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