What Walden Teaches
Thoreau’s opposition to corporal punishment haunts his classic book.
Freshly graduated from Harvard in the fall of 1837, David Henry Thoreau, aged twenty, accepted a teaching position at the Center Grammar School in Concord, Massachusetts. The job carried excellent pay—$500 a year—and sole responsibility for one hundred male students. As his friend Ellery Channing tells it, Thoreau introduced himself by “announcing that he should not flog, but would talk morals as a punishment instead. A fortnight sped glibly along, when a knowing Deacon, one of the school committee, walked in and told him that he must use the ferule, or the school would spoil.” Thoreau selected six students at random, whipped them, and quit that evening.
It is tempting to read Thoreau’s school experiences until this inauspicious career moment—Harvard’s dull and deeply unpopular curriculum, the monotony of schoolteaching—as a grand set-up for rejection of formal education in favor of worldly exploration. There is corroborating evidence for this argument: on October 22, 1837, soon after resigning, Thoreau, encouraged by his neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson, began his journal. Over the years he filled volumes of manuscript pages, from which A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden emerged. That same October, he began to insist on being called Henry David, switching his given names in an event that one biographer describes as his "true commencement."
Thoreau was known for his rapport with children. Emerson would eulogize him as “the captain of a huckleberry party,” a reference to his friend’s frequent nature walks with students and village children. Emerson’s son, Edward, wrote a book in which he credits Thoreau for introducing nature study to the schools and opposing corporal punishment, never mind that the man, “while living at Walden, actually often went out to tea, and carried pies home from his mother’s larder.”
Despite the pleasant accounts of his teacherly manner, Thoreau makes several infamous references to the impracticality of school. In his journal, he exhorts, “How vain it is to teach youth, or anybody, truths! They can only learn them after their own fashion, and when they get ready.” Walden offers several infamous send-ups of schooling, including this confessional one: “As I did not teach for the good of my fellow-men, but simply for a livelihood, this was a failure.”
Like so many nineteenth-century writers, then, Thoreau was a lapsed schoolmaster. We might even say that quitting that first teaching job instigated a period of creative self-fashioning, allowing Henry David Thoreau to become the writer whom we all read in high school.
In case you never noticed, your required school reading was trying to make a rebel out of you. From The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to The Catcher in the Rye to Walden, American students spend a lot of time reading about protagonists who escape from the social institutions—school, church, home—that dictate young people’s lives. While it’s unlikely that you ever planned to build a raft or “light out for the Territory,” your 17-year-old self might have considered jumping the next train, à la Caulfield, for an unchaperoned weekend in the big city. And chances are that your adult self still occasionally yearns for a full-on nature retreat in the vein of Walden.
Often perceived as the most mature escape fantasy in American literature—”I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately”—Walden appeals to the individualist streak in all of us. Shrugging off social conventions, the book encourages, we think, a retreat to a cabin in the woods, a rejection of obligation and dependence in favor of introspection, creative production, and no damned distractions. Never mind that the house at Walden Pond was built on land owned by Emerson, within earshot of the Fitchburg Railroad tracks, or that Thoreau frequently dined in town, or that, most notoriously, his mother did his laundry. It's the spirit of the thing that matters: the rebellious, profoundly American abdication of social institutions.
But the peripheries of Walden are haunted by social institutions. After all, the only other figures in American literature who run home to their mothers at tea time are schoolchildren: “I went to the woods,” writes Thoreau, “because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it has to teach.” What if the book that symbolizes for so many of us a retreat from the constraints of institutional life and social obligation is all about how to improve the school’s coercive motivational approach to teaching?
As the anecdote of Thoreau’s resignation demonstrates, corporal punishment was an enduring, if heavily debated, means of schoolroom order in the nineteenth century. Whipping, “the corner-stone of a sound education,” in the cheeky rendering of Emerson fils, was a motivational tool as well as a disciplinary one. Teachers used the ferule just as often to spur on slower students as to punish deliberate disobedience. As more women became teachers, pedagogical ideals also shifted towards a model of affectionate authority, in which appeals to the child’s conscience replaced corporal punishment, but actual schoolroom practices remained unchanged for decades.
Thoreau’s claim in Walden, “I did not teach for the good of my fellow-men,” indicates an unwillingness to rule his students, his “fellow-men,” by the rod, a practice considered to be for the boys’ own “good” by authorities such as the Concord deacon. Protesting the imperative to practice regular corporal punishment, Thoreau, goaded by the deacon, whipped students at random. Forced to participate in the system, he treated it literally, making the point that if we believe children learn through physical coercion, then they ought to be whipped by turns.
Walden is, of course, an encomium to self-sufficiency. Yet students who trudge through the book’s coy philosophizing to arrive, with relief, at its Transcendental sound bites rarely have time to consider where and how young people on a mass scale are meant to develop that self-sufficiency. Thoreau’s 1837 retreat from a system that motivated through coercion haunts his masterwork. He dismissed outright what his contemporaries believed to be the key motivating factor in getting students to learn. There was, so to speak, solace in the whip, which provided a framework for task-oriented, rote teaching and learning. Critical exploration is a messier process. A lapsed schoolmaster, Thoreau in his book develops practices and methods for helping students, as the author writes in his journal, “get ready” to learn truth “after their own fashion.”
Crucially, Walden teaches that the key to self-sufficiency is learning, even in the midst of the modern world and its distractions, not to rely on external coercion for stimulus. We give students such books to read now even as we sit them in rows, stand them in lines, and insist that they raise hands to participate in discussion, perhaps hoping that a literary education will teach young people values that many aspects of school quash. We ask students to engage with rebellious protagonists because we want them—even in school, an environment that declares at every turn its ambivalence towards individualism—to think at least a little for themselves.
Adapted from a (much) longer chapter on “Thoreau’s Kindergarten Aesthetic” in “The Transcendental Schoolroom: Childhood Education and Literary Culture in Antebellum America,” my dissertation.
