it of excellence (Hovde 18).Joseph Krutch, a Thoreau historian details that Thoreau can help us reconcile these self-defeating oppositions because he himself was a doer and a thinker, an innovative teacher, and a speculative writer. Although his career as a classroom teacher ended early, he continued to reflect on the process of education throughout the voluminous writings that recorded and shaped his own low-key but intensely experienced life. He embodied the notion of continuing education and lifelong learning. Thoreau was an advocate for continuing education more fundamentally in the sense that he knew that no that no system is sufficient or permanent, that to be responsively alive is to be a perpetual learner, always aware of both the possibilities and the limits of one’s current knowledge. Thoreau remained a learner of how he learned, keeping in his journal a series of internal reflections. His journal is one of the most thorough and detailed records we have of fruitful insights between world and mind, experiencing and conceptualizing, living and writing (Allen 12).The fact that Thoreau’s educational philosophy was rooted in his own immediate experience does not mean that this philosophy was eccentric or narrowly personal. Thoreau’s vision of education can best be explained and appreciated by viewing it as part of the “tradition of the active mind” (Hovde 8). The term tradition is somewhat contradictory here, since this flowing together of thinking seeks to free itself from the grip of the past in favor of the immediate act of the mind encountering the world. The active mind trusts its own workings over any previous formulations, whether by itself or others. It has played a vital part in our educational history, although ignored or suppressed by forces Thoreau constantly battled: unthinking routine, institutional inertia, and blind authoritarianism. This anti-traditional tradition view of school...
