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The Henry D. Thoreau Quotation Page: Education
  • 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]
  • What does education do? It makes a straight-cut ditch out of a free, meandering brook. [Journal, 1850 ]
  • 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. [Journal, 15 October 1859]
  • I am still a learner, not a teacher, feeding somewhat omnivorously, browsing both stalk & leaves — [HDT to H.G.O. Blake, 21 May 1856]
  • 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]
  • 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"]
    It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know. [Journal, 4 October 1859]
  • 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"]
  • 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]
  • 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]
  • 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: Unless otherwise noted, quotations are from The Writings of Henry David Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906)

 

Walden Woods (Photographer: Herbert Gleason, from The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, 1906)

It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all. — Journal, 5 December 1856

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