As a multidisciplinary approach, Appalachian studies may provide insights for understanding the context of education in the region. Appalachia is marginal to the official centers of political, economic, and cultural power in the South just as the South is marginal to the core of official power in the United States. In both cases the result is ambiguous identity and conflicting tendencies towards acceptance or rejection of the hegemony--the authority of a dominant elite who establishes society's cultural standards. Questions of cultural dominance and subordination divide core from periphery in any complex society and create identity conflicts that pull marginal, nonelite personalities between the poles of assimilation and separatism. A continuous history of marginality and subordination has left the descendants of North British borderers who migrated to Appalachia with an impaired sense of autonomous identity and self-worth. This ambivalence is compounded by the ambivalence of the core culture towards its own advancement. As in many other places, the "folk" is seen by intellectuals as both a backward illiterate segment of the population and the romanticized remnant of a national patrimony. The selective reconstruction or wholesale invention of folk traditions compensates for feelings of cultural inferiority in peripheral intellectuals. Folk revivalism is only one form that counter-hegemonic movements have taken. In Appalachian studies, the apparent conflict between the "action folk" and the "cultural folk" has become less intense with the growing realization that these positions represent alternate solutions to the fundamental problem of marginality, subordination, and the consequent need for self-actualization. (SV)