Henry David Thoreau On Education Henry David Thoreau On Education Thoreau’s relation to the institution of education has been problematic. He entered the teaching profession early, as an undergraduate, and left it a few years later, when he closed the private school he had conducted with his brother. Although there were external reasons for this action, Thoreau’s departure from teaching also resulted from disillusion with the conventional classroom, a growing sense that it prevented learning rather then fostering it. Despite having undergone a formal education at Harvard University, Thoreau challenged existing teaching standards and sought to implement idealistic educational principles. He emphasized a deep respect for the local and concrete as the basis of all learning, education through experience as intrinsically valuable, and a vision of schooling in which knowledge is as much constructed as it is transmitted. Also, placing focus where it really should be, he increasingly came to feel that “it is strange that men are in such haste to get fame as teachers rather then knowledge as learners” (Allen 217). He spent the rest of his life learning and writing; the two were usually the same for him. He never lost his concern for teaching, both envisioning better ways to go about it and launching a powerful critique of the way it was usually done: “What does education often do! – It makes a strait-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook” (Allen 312). Because he stands outside the mainstream of educational practice, Thoreau can help us transcend the false oppositions that have arisen between traditionalists and progressives, between advocates of traditional education, and those of openness and creativity. Thoreau envisioned and enacted a necessary synthesis, a working dialectic of thinking and doing, of transmitting old cultural forms and creating new ones, and of democratic schooling and the pursu...
