as a place where the tensions that plague our existence – body and soul, self and society, emotion and intellect – can be reconciled. The actual embodiments of this view have been on a small scale and short lived. Yet these experiments have kept the possibility of schools as genuine democratic intellectual communities (Hovde 11).After graduating from Harvard College in the summer of 1837, Thoreau, now twenty, began his shortest and most notorious teaching stint. In that year he was fortunate enough to land a position in his native Concord, as the teacher at the Center School, the main public college prep school. This post was traditionally offered to a recent Harvard graduate, but Thoreau, unlike many of his predecessors, was not just biding his time en route to becoming a lawyer or minister. He fully intended to stay in teaching for several years, “perhaps – after a year of public school experience and self-directed study – taking a position in a private academy” (Krutch 153-54). But during his first few days, Nehemiah Ball visited Thoreau, one of the three members of the school committee. Ball found the activity and the noise level of the classroom too high and instructed the young teacher to use corporal punishment more often. Stung by the criticism, Thoreau applied the ferule (a stick for rapping on the hand rather than a cowhide strip for flogging, which the school did not have) to six students, some chosen at random, some punished for minor infractions. That evening he handed in his resignation (Hovde 14).Instead of disillusionment with teaching, Thoreau articulates an inspiring vision that he was to apply to the rest of his educational work. This vision is a remarkable characteristic of the values inherent in the tradition of the active mind. Thoreau chooses to see education not simply as a means, a preparation for something else, but as valuable by itself. He asserts a basic succe...
