Spreading Foxfire

His tenth-graders at the remote Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School in Georgia were bored with their English classes, so Brooks Eliot Wigginton set them to work publishing a quarterly magazine of stories about the skills, thoughts and experiences of the elderly mountaineers in the nearby Appalachians. A collection of their stories became a bestseller, The Foxfire Book (TIME, March 27), and now Wigginton's technique of teaching English composition through junior journalism is spreading.

Foxfire started publishing in 1967 and is still going strong. While only half of the graduates of the 240-pupil Rabun Gap school go on to college, all of Foxfire's full-time staffers do--about a dozen each year. "It's a refuge for the kids where adults take them seriously," says "Wig," as his students call him. Many are so excited by the magazine that they even work on weekends, interviewing their neighbors on such subjects as quilting, moonshining and faith healing. Says June Graduate Karen Cox: "I would have dropped out of school if it hadn't been for Wig and Foxfire. He made me want to learn."

Wild Turnips. That change is what has attracted the interest of teachers in other American subcultures, and Wig now travels far and wide to explain his methods. He has helped Puerto Rican youngsters in New York City to found the Fourth Street i, which records the street games, block news and recipes of the Lower East Side. He has encouraged Oglala Sioux children in Pine Ridge, S. Dak., to publish Hoyekiya (Sioux for "to find a voice"), which has printed stories on tribal culture, including the sun dance, herbal medicine and the tipsinna, an edible wild turnip.

Similar magazines have been founded this summer by Flathead Indians in Ronan, Mont., Chicanes in Berkeley, Calif., Navajos in Ramah, N. Mex., and both Indians and Eskimos in Alaska. Unlike Foxfire's originators, who began with $400 raised from parents and friends, the other groups can obtain money and guidance from IDEAS, Inc., a Washington-based educational foundation that has hired Wigginton as its $425-a-month adviser. Wig has settled permanently in Rabun Gap, where he is building a log cabin home. Now 29, he summered in the town as a child with his father, who was a professor at the University of Georgia, then came back after graduating from Cornell.

Not long ago he and Karen Cox spent a week briefing visiting Indian, Chicano and black children and their teachers on problems as diverse as copyright forms and printing presses. Then they spoke about the serious purpose: "These old people have lived and learned the hard way; what you learn by living is the best education you can have," said Karen. Added Wig: "But there aren't many ways you can get a job if you yourself can't read and write."

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