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Thoreau on Education

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Lawrence Willson
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Extract

In the winter of 1835, when he was a student at Harvard College, Henry Thoreau briefly “kept school” in Canton, Massachusetts. In 1837, after his graduation, he kept the town school in Concord for a fortnight but gave it up because he was unwilling to punish pupils by whipping. “I have ever been disposed to regard the cowhide as a non-conductor,” he wrote, at the end of the year, to Orestes Brownson, at whose home he had stayed while he was a “practice teacher” in Canton, “…. We should seek to be fellow-students with the pupil, and we should learn of, as well as with him, if we would be most helpful to him.”

Type
Research Article
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , March 1962 , pp. 19 - 29
Copyright
Copyright © 1962, University of Pittsburgh Press 

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References

Notes

1. Quoted by Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau (Boston, 1939), 67. Kenneth W. Cameron, “Thoreau's Three Months Out of Harvard and His First Publication,” The Emerson Society Quarterly, No. 5 (1956), 3; and Scudder, Townsend, Concord: American Town (Boston, 1947), 159–60.Google Scholar

2. A description of a day's schedule in the school of the Thoreaus is contained in Clayton Hoagland's “The Diary of Thoreau's 'Gentle Boy,'” The New England Quarterly 23 (December, 1955), 481–82. This essay describes the life at the school of Edmund Quincy Sewall, who enrolled there at the age of twelve, in 1840.Google Scholar

3. Elmore Hurd, Harry, “Henry David Thoreau—A Pioneer in the Field of Education,” Education 49 (February, 1929), 372–76. Hoagland, (478, 486) notes that boarding students could evade the weekly exercise in composition, every other week, by writing a letter home once a fortnight. They also had the project of planting gardens.Google Scholar

4. In one of his “collegiate paradoxes” Thoreau had written while he was at Harvard, “If we engage in teaching from proper motives, we shall invariably make it a permanent profession; those who do otherwise regard it as a means. And this they may safely do, if as a means to something higher. But no,—their end is within, not beyond their means; the end was soon attained, and the means neglected.” Sanborn, F. B., The Life of Henry David Thoreau (Boston and New York, 1917), 196–97.Google Scholar

5. Journal 13, 67 (My references to the published work of Thoreau are to the Walden Edition of The Writings of Henry David Thoreau (Boston and New York, 1906) 20 vols. In the Walden Edition, Thoreau's Journal, Bradford Torrey, Ed., is included as Volumes 7–20, but with an alternative numbering: 1–14. I have used the alternative numbering. The other volumes of his works I have referred to by their commonly recognized titles.)Google Scholar

6. Ibid. Google Scholar

7. Walden, 56–57.Google Scholar

8. Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 5 (Boston and New York, 1911), Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes, Eds., 250–51.Google Scholar

9. Sanborn, , 209.Google Scholar

10. Journal 5, 427.Google Scholar

11. Excursions, 46.Google Scholar

12. The Maine Woods, 323.Google Scholar

13. Walden, 56.Google Scholar

14. Albee, John, Remembrances of Emerson (New York, 1903), 32–33.Google Scholar

15. Familiar Letters, F. B. Sanborn, Ed., 408.Google Scholar

16. Journal 3, 26.Google Scholar

17. Journal 4, 323. Even later—Journal 8, 204—he wrote, in a comment on foreign travel: “At best, Paris could only be a school in which to learn to live here, a stepping-stone to Concord, a school in which to fit for this university.”Google Scholar

18. Hurd, , 375.Google Scholar

19. Cape Cod and Miscellanies, 448; cf. Journal 13, 15.Google Scholar

20. Sanborn, , 240.Google Scholar

21. Journal 13, 10.Google Scholar

22. Journal 12, 371.Google Scholar

23. Idem, 372.Google Scholar

24. MA 602. The so-called “Indian Notebooks” are a series of eleven manuscript volumes preserved in the Pierpont Morgan Library as MA 596-MA 606, inclusive, bearing the title, “Extracts from Works, relating to the Indians.” I quote from these notebooks by permission of the Trustees of the Pierpont Morgan Library.Google Scholar

25. Sanborn, , 180–183, passim. Google Scholar

26. MA 599. Thoreau's interest in the subject is shown by his copying other accounts into his Indian Notebooks. In Notebook 7 (MA 602) there is a series of notes from John Josselyn's An Account of Two Voyages (London, 1675); in Notebook 9 (MA 604) are notes from John Lawson's A New Account of Carolina (in John Steven's A New Collection of Voyages and Travels (London, 1711) and Robert Beverley's The History of Virginia (London, 1722).Google Scholar

27. Albee, , 37.Google Scholar

28. Ms Am 278.5, preserved in the Houghton Library, Harvard University; I quote by permission of the Houghton Library.Google Scholar

29. Journal 2, 342.Google Scholar

30. “Walking,” Excursions, 205.Google Scholar

31. Hurd, , 373–374.Google Scholar

32. Journal 2, 400; cf. Excursions, 27.Google Scholar

33. Warburton, George D. was the author of Hochelaga, a work in two volumes, edited by Eliot Warburton, published in London and New York in 1846. The quotation from Thoreau is from HM 953 (… A Yankee in Canada: Final Version … [including portions of Cape Cod]), preserved in The Huntington Library, in San Marino, California. I quote it by permission of The Huntington Library. The remark is repeated in essentially the same form in the so-called “Canadian Notebook,” MA 595, which is preserved in the Pierpont Morgan Library under the title, “Extracts from Works, relating to Canada.”Google Scholar

34. MA 595. I quote from this notebook by permission of the Trustees of the Pierpont Morgan Library.Google Scholar

35. HM 953. The last sentence appears also in MA 595, directly following the quotation identified in the preceding note. The only variation is a comma after the word education. Google Scholar

36. Walden, 122.Google Scholar

37. Journal 13, 145.Google Scholar