den he writes, “Every man has to learn the points of the compass again as often as he wakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction” (171). The entire process of moving out to, and then leaving, Walden Pond, and of writing Walden, embodies the vision that education is never completed, always vibrantly alive to the present circumstances of life.While Thoreau sees this cycle as at the heart of the educational process, it is in the area of writing, that he writes with the greatest depth. He engaged in this learning activity daily, noting: “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!” (Allen 262). Thoreau describes the true writer as someone who moves beyond the constriction of language to construct new forms more relevant to the present time, helping us see what the prior forms left out. As Thoreau writes, he illustrates the point “He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers drive down stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved; who derived his words as often as he used them, transplanted them to his page with earth adhering to their roots” (120). When Thoreau retreats to Walden Pond or takes one of his shorter excursions to wilder places like the Maine woods, it is not to commune mutely with nature but to explore and exploit sources for new language, which is also new knowledge. Some progressive educators make the mistake of thinking it is enough to have experiences, but experiences are educational only if the students actively clarify, internalize, and reflect on them through their own language making. The equal mistake of educational conservatives is to assume that inert bits and pieces of culture committed to memory somehow constitute thinking (Hovde 91).Thoreau believed that reading and thinking should not be locked away within the mind only. Thoreau said...
