Reform by Thoreau

By John Kaufman

There is a lot of talk and concern about education these days, but I have heard no one talking about Henry Thoreau and his book. Walden could serve as a manual for American teachers and anyone interested in how to go about creating a good school or a better community.

Thoreau built himself a school for a little more than $28 in 1845. It was a house, yes, but also a school, a shelter in the woods beside a pond to "front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." Thoreau had attended Harvard and taught school for a while in Concord, Mass. But in those days it was thought that to educate a child you had to beat him or her, a method Thoreau refused, to his credit, to adopt. He started a new school with his brother John, but when John became ill and died, Henry took to the woods to discover how cheaply and independently he himself could become a student: "Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants."

As a nation, we seem to have forgotten that most of what we call education takes place outside of schools, in homes and communities. A school is not a factory; a school is a community building in which a certain kind of cultural knowledge is revered and passed on. A good teacher is a person who knows and loves some cultural subject or subjects and who enjoys sharing what he or she knows and loves. A good student is someone who has been taught by his or her family and community to value cultural traditions, books, and teachers. A good school is composed of good teachers and good students, though most of the responsibility rests with the adults of the community, both parents and teachers. Of course, a child need not attend a school to become a good student or a good person, and parents can be teachers if they have...