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The Thoreau Institute
at Walden Woods Library
Thoreau's
Life & Writings
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Henry D. Thoreau Quotation Pages
On Education
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Those things for
which the most money is demanded are never the things which the
student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in
the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he
gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries
no charge is made. [Walden "Economy"]
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What does education
do? It makes a straight-cut ditch out of a free, meandering brook. [Journal
1850 ]
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We boast of our
system of education, but why stop at schoolmasters and schoolhouses?
We are all schoolmasters, and our schoolhouse is the universe. To
attend chiefly to the desk or schoolhouse while we neglect the
scenery in which it is placed is absurd. If we do not look out we
shall find our find schoolhouse standing in a cow-yard at last. [Journal15 October 1859]
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I am still a learner, not a teacher, feeding somewhat
omnivorously, browsing both stalk & leaves [HDT
to H.G.O. Blake, 21 May 1856]
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Men have a respect for scholarship and learning
greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve. [A Week
on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers "Sunday"]
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We boast that we
belong to the nineteenth century and are making the most rapid
strides of any nation. But consider how little this village does for
its own culture. I do not wish to flatter my townsmen, nor to be
flattered by them, for that will not advance either of us. We need
to be provoked,goaded like oxen, as we are, into a trot. We have a
comparatively decent system of common schools, schools for infants
only; but excepting the half-starved Lyceum in the winter, and
latterly the puny beginning of a library suggested by the state, no
school for ourselves. We spend more on almost any article of bodily
aliment or ailment than on our mental aliment. 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. Shall the world be
confined to one Paris or one Oxford forever? Cannot students be
boarded here and get a liberal education under the skies of Concord?
Can we not hire some Abelard to lecture to us? Alas! what with
foddering the cattle and tending the store, we are kept from school
too long, and our education is sadly neglected. [Walden
"Reading"]
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It is only when we
forget all our learning that we begin to know. [Journal 4
October 1859]
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We seem to have forgotten that the expression "a
liberal education" originally meant among the Romans one worthy
of free men; while the learning of trades and professions by
which to get your livelihood merely, was considered worthy of
slaves only. But taking a hint from the word, I would go a step
further and say, that it is not the man of wealth and leisure
simply, though devoted to art, or science, or literature, who, in a
true sense, is liberally educated, but only the earnest and
free man. ["The Last Days of John Brown"]
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We saw one school-house in our walk, and listened to
the sounds which issued from it; but it appeared like a place where
the process, not of enlightening, but of obfuscating the mind was
going on, and the pupils received only so much light as could
penetrate the shadow of the Catholic church. [A Yankee in Canada
"St. Anne"]
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Many college text-books, which were a weariness and a
stumbling-block to me when studied, I have since read a
little in with pleasure and profit. [Journal 19 February
1854]
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Perhaps I should give some account of myself. I would
make education a pleasant thing both to the teacher and the scholar.
This discipline, which we allow to be the end of life, should not be
one thing in the schoolroom, and another in the street. We should
seek to be fellow students with the pupil, and should learn of, as
well as with him, if we would be most helpful to him. But I am not
blind to the difficulties of the case; it supposes a degree of
freedom which rarely exists. It hath not entered into the heart of
man to conceive the full import of that word
Freedom
not a paltry Republican
freedom, with a posse comitatus at his heels to administer it
in doses as to a sick child-but a freedom proportionate to the
dignity of his nature a
freedom that shall make him feel that he is a man among men, and
responsible only to that Reason of which he is a particle, for his
thoughts and his actions. [HDT to Orestes Brownson, 30 December
1837]
A
Note on the Text:
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Source:
Unless otherwise noted, quotations are from The Writings of Henry
David Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906)
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Report
errors to the
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