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.”