The wild men (Walden 179)

“Early in the morning, while all things are crisp with frost, men come with fishing-reels and slender lunch, and let down their fine lines through the snowy field to take pickerel and perch; wild men, who instinctively follow other fashions and trust other authorities than their townsmen, and by their goings and comings stitch towns together in parts where else they would be ripped. They sit and eat their luncheon in stout fear-naughts on the dry oak leaves on the shore, as wise in natural lore as the citizen is in artificial.” — Henry David Thoreau, “The Pond in Winter,” Walden

As with the Canadian woodchopper that Henry wrote about in an earlier chapter (see this post) , he is fascinated with — and admires — men of low social standing live close to nature and are “wise in natural lore.” They are not bookish like Henry. Theirs is a world deeds and not of words — they “know and can tell much less than they have done.” They live in a material world and not an abstract one.

“His life itself passes deeper in Nature than the studies of the naturalist penetrate.”

Thoreau is himself a naturalist, of course, and recognizes that in some ways these uneducated men understand nature more deeply than he does. Cocky as he can sometimes be, he recognizes the value of other kinds learning besides books.

His goal seems to be to combine the experiential knowledge of the “wild man” with the learning of the scholar and the aesthetics of a poet.

(About  “A Year in Walden”)

Columbus Day: How to distort the past without actually lying

Here’s a re-run from last year, which I think is apropos considering the current squabble over AP history standards. Many Americans still believe that the purpose of history is to teach patriotism. The best teachers, however, try to instill critical thinking skills and a willingness to follow the evidence wherever it leads, even if it ruins your preferred narrative.

But narratives can be tenacious, and it’s possible to cling to one in spite of overwhelming evidence. It’s possible to do so even while acknowledging that evidence. The story of Christopher Columbus shows how:

The Curious People

Replicas of Columbus’s ships at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Via Wikipedia

Columbus Day is a US holiday which is celebrated with annual arguments about the propriety of honoring Christopher Columbus with a holiday. The atrocities that he and his men committed are so well documented that you’d think it would be impossible to defend the man, but people are still doing it. Today’s post isn’t about Columbus so much as it’s about how to defend Columbus (not that I’m defending him). There’s an important lesson here about history and about the way we talk about history.

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Thoreau’s friend the Canadian woodchopper (Walden 103)

While in the woods, Thoreau met a French Canadian woodchopper who was a “true Homeric or Paphlagonian man.” (Paphlagonia was an ancient Roman province on the Black Sea.) His name was Alek Therien. Henry does not name him in the book, but describes him at length; he obviously likes and admires the man, and his comments tell us a lot about the characteristics that Henry valued in a person.

“A more simple and natural man it would be hard to find. Vice and disease, which cast such a sombre moral hue over the world, seemed to have hardly any existence for him. He was about twenty-eight years old, and had left Canada and his father’s house a dozen years before to work in the States, and earn money to buy a farm with at last, perhaps in his native country.”

Henry liked him because he was sincere, unpretentious, thought for himself, and lived simply. He was good at what he did but wasn’t obsessed with work. He was friendly and sociable but spent a good deal of time alone.

What if we had taken Thoreau’s advice about education? (Walden 75)

What kind of world would we be living in today if people had taken Thoreau’s advice 150 years ago?

“To act collectively is according to the spirit of our institutions; and I am confident that, as our circumstances are more flourishing, our means are greater than the nobleman’s. New England can hire all the wise men in the world to come and teach her, and board them round the while, and not be provincial at all. That is the uncommon school we want. Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men. If it is necessary, omit one bridge over the river, go round a little there, and throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us.”

Thoreau on “uncommon schools.” What do we mean by good jobs and education? (Walden 74)

“It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women. It is time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure — if they are, indeed, so well off — to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives.” — Henry David Thoreau, “Reading,” Walden

Technology has enabled an expansion of continuing education in ways that Henry couldn’t even imagine. But what I find interesting here is something that he doesn’t draw attention to, probably because to him it’s so obvious, and in one way or another he’s been talking about it throughout the book: notice that he sees education not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself. What else would you do if you had leisure in your old age but keep studying and learning?

This attitude is at odds with our growing perception of education as being strictly job training. Everyone wants the next generation to be qualified for good jobs and to be able to provide for their families. But there’s a world of difference in saying, “I want them to get an education so they can get a good job,” and “I want them to get good jobs that provide the time and resources to continue their education.” Not only is the order of priority different in these two sentences, but “good job” and “education” take on different meanings as well.

(About  “A Year in Walden”)

Building your own school (Walden 30)

Continuing the thought from #29 about the value of doing things yourself, Thoreau suggests, after describing the construction of his little house, that students participate in building their schools and colleges.

“I mean that they should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them in this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end.”

Booker T. Washington. Wikipedia

I know of one school that did this by necessity. When Booker T. Washington, a former slave, founded the Tuskegee Institute, the students actually helped build the original buildings. The students were black in the American South in the late nineteenth century — going to public school was out of the question, and so the only way for them to have a school was to build it themselves.

It was a terrible situation — even with an education the students faced a lifetime of bigotry — but Washington tried to make the best of it. He felt that by building their school, the students also built character. Had Thoreau still been living, the two men would have had a lot to talk about.

A Year in Walden (Walden 1)

Original title page of Walden featuring a picture drawn by Thoreau’s sister Sophia. Via Wikipedia

One should not read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden quickly. It’s a book that benefits from a leisurely pace. This book can change how you look at the world and improve your enjoyment of life. Even if you live in a city and like modern technology, as I do.

That’s why for the next year I’m going to blog about Walden — quoting it, commenting on it, amplifying and arguing with it. It’s like a book club that meets four days a week (new posts on Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday), but the readings are mostly a good deal shorter than this post — just a few minutes out of your day. And though I hope you’ll read the book for yourself, you don’t have to do so to follow these posts. I’ll quote as much as I need to for the post to make sense.

Just remember: Walden isn’t something to finish and check off your list. It’s something live with, a companion. I can think of very few books that stand up to that kind of use, but this is one.

Why we all need countercultural education

Here’s another way of looking at the role of education. The author is thinking of schools but I have something broader in mind. More about that below. First, here are the opening paragraphs of “Unplugged Schools” by Lowell Monke, which appeared in the September/October 2007 issue of Orion:

“Educators say the darndest things. Consider this from a high school social studies teacher who told me, ‘Kids don’t read anymore. The only way I can teach them anything is by showing them videos.’ Or this from a middle school principal who defended serving children junk food every day by telling me, ‘That’s what they’re used to eating. They won’t eat it if it doesn’t taste like fast food.’

“Aside from their stunning capitulation of adult responsibility, these comments illustrate what has become a common disregard for one of schooling’s most important tasks: to compensate for, rather than intensify, society’s excesses.

“I first encountered the idea of the compensatory role of schools in 1970, while preparing to become a teacher. In Teaching as a Subversive Activity, Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner argued that one of the roles of schools in a free society is to serve as a cultural thermostat — to take the temperature of the culture, determine where the culture is over- and underheated, and then gear instruction to compensate for those extremes. If a culture becomes too enamored with competition, schools would emphasize cooperation; if it overemphasizes individuality, schools would emphasize community responsibility; if it allows poor children to go hungry, schools would (and do) develop lunch and breakfast programs to feed them; and so on.”

How to erase civilizations from history books

So you’re walking through a wilderness preserve near your city when you discover ancient ruins of a lost city built by a long forgotten but highly sophisticated civilization. You realize with a start that this ‘wilderness’ is simply what grew up after the civilization came to some mysterious bad end.

This sounds like the premise of any number of fictional stories, but essentially it’s the real life story of the so-called New World, which wasn’t nearly as new as its European settlers assumed. I’m going to talk about two books here, both bestsellers, one relatively recent and the other now so obscure that you’ve probably never heard of it — though it contains an unintentionally enlightening surprise for modern readers.

A History of Our World in 18 Minutes

…And he doesn’t even talk especially fast.

One of the helpful things about history is the way it gives us perspective on our own lives. Issues that we think are new or unique to our day have usually appeared before in some form or other. History helps us see the large trends rather than getting lost in the day-to-day details of current events.

“Big History” takes this even further. As David Christian’s talk demonstrates, the idea of Big History is to step way back and look at the broad scope of events in terms of various time scales… including the largest time scale of all. Not only is it a great way to induce awe, but it will also change and deepen the way you look at not only current events, but history itself.