ssion between the schoolroom and the street, between the process of learning and the rest of experience. He believed that the teacher could learn with and from the student (Krutch 17).Along with his brother John, Henry opened up a school in Concord. Although the brothers retained most features of conventional schooling, they supplemented these with a number of activities that moved education beyond the classroom walls. There were frequent field trips, and not just to fields for nature study. The students were taken to the offices of a local paper to watch typesetting and to a gunsmith to watch the regulating of gunsights. In the spring, each student had a small plot of plowed land to plant (Krutch 21). On 1 April 1841, after just three years, the brothers closed their school because of John’s failing health from Tuberculosis. Thoreau was never to be a classroom teacher again. On the positive side, he wanted to devote all his energies to his writing. But on the negative side, he had a deep, underlying suspicion of the whole activity of formal education. In his journal he writes “How vain it is to teach youth, or anybody, truths! They can only learn them after their own fashions, and when they get ready” (Allen 79).Thoreau’s subsequent involvement with education was primarily as a writer. He did not write a separate single work on the subject, but his insights are found throughout his work, most richly in Walden and in his journals. Thoreau envisions education that does not simply pass on the end results of past cultural creations but that immerses each student in the entire cycle of experiencing, formulating, and then reinstating these formulations back into the experience to test, hone, and modify. And just as crucial as the construction or reconstruction of cultural forms is the continual destruction and transcendence of the restrictive old forms, especially when they are of our own making. In Wal...
