Schoolteacher Thoreau - Trudy Grienauer
7 February 2010
Opening words
Nathaniel Hawthorne was introduced to Thoreau in 1842 by Ralph Waldo Emerson. He wrote in his notes:
"Mr. Thoreau is a keen and delicate observer of nature - a genuine observer, which I suspect, is almost as
rare a character as even an original poet; and Nature, in return for his love, seems to adopt him as her
especial child, and shows him secrets which few others are allowed to witness. He is familiar with beast,
fish, fowl, and reptile, and has strange stories to tell of adventures, and friendly passages with these lower
brethren of mortality. Herb and flower, likewise, wherever they grow, whether in garden, or wild wood, are
his familiar friends. He is also on intimate terms with the clouds, and can tell the portents of storms.
It is a characteristic trait, that he has a great regard for the memory of the Indian tribes, whose wild life
ould have suited him so well; and strange to say, he seldom walks over a ploughed field without picking up an
arrow-point, a spear-head, or other relic of the red men - as if their spirits willed him to be the inheritor
of their simple wealth."
(Nathaniel Hawthorne, around 1842)
Story for all ages
For the story, Josephine and Kyle performed a scene adapted from "The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail" by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. Henry is teaching school, when Deacon Nehemiah Ball comes to visit and is shocked about Henry's teaching methods ...
Reading
The end of life is education. An education is good or bad, according to the disposition or frame of mind it
induces. If it tend to cherish and develop the religious sentiment - continually to remind man of his
mysterious relation to God and Nature - and exalt him above the toil and drudgery of this matter-of-fact world,
it is good. Civilization, we think, not only does not accomplish this, but is directly adverse to it.
Wisdom is the result of education, and education being the bringing out, or development, of that which is in a
man, by contact with the Not Me, is safer in the hands of Nature than of Art.
Learning is Art's creature; but it is not essential to the perfect man - it cannot educate.
The naturalist, the chemist, the mechanist, is no more a man for all his learning. Life is still as short as
ever, death as inevitable, and the heavens are as far off.
(Henry David Thoreau, Journals, 1837)
Sermon
Closing words
It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know. I do not get nearer by a hair's breadth
to any natural object so long as I presume that I have an introduction to it from some learned man. To conceive
of it with a total apprehension I must for the thousandth time approach it as something totally strange.
If you would make acquaintance with the ferns you must forget your botany. You must get rid of what is
commonly called knowledge of them. Not a single scientific term or distinction is the least to the purpose,
for you would fain perceive something, and you must approach the object totally unprejudiced. You must be aware
that no thing is what you have taken it to be. Your greatest success will be simply to perceive that such
things are, and you will have no communication to make to the Royal Society.
(Henry David Thoreau, Journals, 1859)