Emerson readings: texts
Focus on: the book, books as a problem in emerson for education [as it is for religion], for the fixing of the flowing.
So the question of learning is a question of how the student/reader relates to the material. And this is where the metonymic can be helpful.
Trace this arc from American scholar to The Poet and then on to Swedenborg lecture: where the problem/value of books reappears. Which then gives a different meaning to the ‘liberating” and nationalistic senses of the essay as commonly read. Poetry here, instead, as a figure of learning and an issue of the medium of learning.
Emerging ideas
4/15: the sense that we need to look for Emerson’s theories/practice of education in other places. That, like much of his writing, it exists in multiple forms, re-circulated through other names. That in specific places, including the lecture ‘Education,’ there are strong statements that need to be received. But perhaps why the reception has been limited is that we also need to remember the context, and think about the issues of teaching and schooling in the context of thought of the time.
–also: links between emerson’s composing/thinking process and his views on education.
Views of Friendship and links with education and teaching: linked specifically to his connection with fuller (and at same time in 1840 letters, his interest in developing the Dial. Could thus trace education in terms of his friendships with Fuller, Very, Alcott, Thoreau. Education as friendship?
–links with his views on spirit and soul vs the institution of religion. Divinity school address as an essay on education, in that sense. The link with religious declared directly in opening of 1840 ‘education’ lecture.
Perhaps what I need to do is start with the most direct places [education, the school] and then suggest how we need to see the fulfillment of these in other places, all the way back to american scholar. Then go back to the various representative labels and recognize the implication of education in them: scholar, divinity, experience/fate, friendship, poet/writer.
‘emerson and the death of pathos’
On E and rhetoric: http://jac.gsu.edu/jac/16.1/Articles/2.htm
Reading list:
Emerson’s emergence.
Emerson as educator [compared to schopenhauer, nietzsche] in esq
Conant, James. “Emerson as Educator (from “Nietzsche’s Perfectionism: A Reading of Schopenhauer as Educator“). 43.1-4 (1997): 181-206.
Emerson’s mirror (UU publication): http://www.uuworld.org/2003/02/feature1a.html
“Worship” (conduct of lIfe): for links between his views on religion/faith, and education.
The link is becoming and imagination. Writes of the “faithful student”
Also note how at the end the interesting link is with science [could turn here for a specfic view of how emerson might view intelligent design debate today
Worship is culutre
Draws distinction between an education of the senses/understanding: and ecstasy.
Keywords: inspiration; imagination; ‘faithful student”
Poet:
The “liberating gods” passage turns to this focus on “imaginative book” and “nothing is of any value in books..” then to an image of metonymy—of our nearness to the ‘poetry’ of thought and nature, but our inability to access it. Then to Swedenborg: for his ability to translate nature into thought.
Then to “I look in vain for the poet whom I describe”: where we can turn to Whitman’s metonymy as answering the call.
[note: in her Norton essay (from columbia literary history), Packer cites the later Poetry and Imagination and the learn metonymy passage as fuller exposition of his views of the poet]
Poetry and Imagination
[issues up front, that tie with education: the focus on tropes—a lesson from emerson in thinking of literacy and learning in terms of rhetoric (connect to calls for a focus on rhetoric in contrast to rote—cf scholes).
The focus on imagination tied with visual: where I can bring in the implications of photographic thinking
Perhaps read the metonymy vs metaphor as a larger issue in progressive vs traditional education, as it seems to be an underlying issue in views of poetry that emerson is provoking.]
For approach to Emerson: what literacy means
Key is a notion of literacy [how the scholar and his/her reception and reproduction of language—organ of language, as he puts it in Literary ethics]
And key place and problem for this intereaction (synapse—or something from electromagnetism? Spark) of literacy is the book.
So, a foucs on Emerson’s relationship to the book: how that characterizes the problem and potential of literacy learning.
And an important irony (relevant, I presume, to emerson’s absence from discussions of literacy and reform today): the great figure of book learning is suspicious of books.
Prior to Emerson, the context/definition of literacy learning is still broadly print, but more on focus of grammar, rhetoric, handwriting. [I wonder if the classic-grammar-book view vs the practical view of franklin extends and informs emerson’s concern for the book—another version of the deadness of language [primer learning]
Looking ahead, can tie this in to how I might focus on Dewey (his focus on the hand, and in places a similar concern for the book, the text book). Extending out to how dewey can be thought to inform discussions today of electronic literacy [cf dewey and technology disucssion on reading online]. Perhaps circling back to emerson’s luminous allusion.
Potential starting points—noting Emerson’s absence from disucssions of education—how we might make sense of that {and for my study: what that has meant for literacy learning and how we can rectify that).
Note his absence from Bloom’s “Closing”—the troubling irony there being Emerson’s own critique of education, American Scholar, is the founding text of that kind of writing and in my view, of critical studies of american education—as well as being a founding text of american literature and scholarship.
Then, reference to him in Good’s “history of american education” (1956): where we are at another extreme: a strong statement of emerson as education phiosopher and his influence on dewey—although also a stereotyping of him of sorts [as romantic and idealistic], no specific focus on a pedaogogy for literacy. [fully evident in Cremin—devoting a full section to him, linking him to franklin in terms of education influence (and implying that problem is the anti-systematic nature of the philosophy)
Could bring in Buell on anti-mentor (and others who note problem of emerson and a system)
And perhaps this leads in to key focus: the problem of fixing vs. fluid. Or problem, in terms of pedagogy, of a philosophy/theory and even practice of literacy that not only can’t be fixed in a book, but in many ways resists the tradition of books.
[what then would we as teachers do with emerson in the classroom? I see this book as dual in its focus—perhaps using analogies emerson is familiar with: negative and positive; theory and practice, etc. one side is the theory and history of education and learning that is in emerson, and thus is implicit in our teaching of him, by him, but has not been thought of deliberately. Or received and reproduced.
The second strand is an interweaving of practice [interchapters?] designed for language arts and english teachers at all levels, suited for teaching literacy as well as teaching emerson: range of ways I have put emerson into practice.
Maybe here I would then need to address audience: the fact that I am thinking of this as appropriate for all teachers of literacy; for all levels of teaching emerson. This is informed by emerson himself (who is not restricting the scholar to academia) and his conception of a democratic literacy, his experiences reaching a broader audience. It is time, I think, we brought that back into our literacy teaching (and our use of emerson) as well. These are lines I straddle and seek to bridge in my own teaching: writing as much for English Journal as American Literary History—and beyond that: for American Scholar
“Spiritual Laws”
Keyword: Course [curriculum?]/Method
Linked to the course/method of nature—that both implies a curriculum/method of learning, but also points up the problem in need of a curriculum and method that is above our wills, not translatable or bound to a traditional classroom [certainly raises issues for the problem of curriculum mandates, somethin I assume he sees in the cold convention of education.
Note how in this passage and essay, spiritual/moral nature combines with views of learning and education in terms of a ‘nature’ that is above our will—and thus misnamed and misdirected when we try to ‘educate’ (in school or church) against this larger will.
Could link here this view of course/method to “method of nature”
The intellectual life may be kept clean and healthful, if man will live the life of nature, and not import into his mind difficulties which are none of his. No man need be perplexed in his speculations. Let him do and say what strictly belongs to him, and, though very ignorant of books, his nature shall not yield him any intellectual obstructions and doubts. Our young people are diseased with the theological problems of original sin, origin of evil, predestination, and the like. These never presented a practical difficulty to any man, — never darkened across any man’s road, who did not go out of his way to seek them. These are the soul’s mumps, and measles, and whooping-coughs, and those who have not caught them cannot describe their health or prescribe the cure. A simple mind will not know these enemies. It is quite another thing that he should be able to give account of his faith, and expound to another the theory of his self-union and freedom. This requires rare gifts. Yet, without this self-knowledge, there may be a sylvan strength and integrity in that which he is. “A few strong instincts and a few plain rules” suffice us.
My will never gave the images in my mind the rank they now take. The regular course of studies, the years of academical and professional education, have not yielded me better facts than some idle books under the bench at the Latin School. What we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so. We form no guess, at the time of receiving a thought, of its comparative value. And education often wastes its effort in attempts to thwart and balk this natural magnetism, which is sure to select what belongs to it.
In like manner, our moral nature is vitiated by any interference of our will. People represent virtue as a struggle, and take to themselves great airs upon their attainments, and the question is everywhere vexed, when a noble nature is commended, whether the man is not better who strives with temptation. But there is no merit in the matter. Either God is there, or he is not there. We love characters in proportion as they are impulsive and spontaneous. The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues, the better we like him. Timoleon’s victories are the best victories; which ran and flowed like Homer’s verses, Plutarch said. When we see a soul whose acts are all regal, graceful, and pleasant as roses, we must thank God that such things can be and are, and not turn sourly on the angel, and say, `Crump is a better man with his grunting resistance to all his native devils.’
Not less conspicuous is the preponderance of nature over will in all practical life. There is less intention in history than we ascribe to it. We impute deep-laid, far-sighted plans to Caesar and Napoleon; but the best of their power was in nature, not in them. Men of an extraordinary success, in their honest moments, have always sung, `Not unto us, not unto us.’ According to the faith of their times, they have built altars to Fortune, or to Destiny, or to St. Julian. Their success lay in their parallelism to the course of thought, which found in them an unobstructed channel; and the wonders of which they were the visible conductors seemed to the eye their deed. Did the wires generate the galvanism? It is even true that there was less in them on which they could reflect, than in another; as the virtue of a pipe is to be smooth and hollow. That which externally seemed will and immovableness was willingness and self-annihilation. Could Shakspeare give a theory of Shakspeare? Could ever a man of prodigious mathematical genius convey to others any insight into his methods? If he could communicate that secret, it would instantly lose its exaggerated value, blending with the daylight and the vital energy the power to stand and to go.
The lesson is forcibly taught by these observations, that our life might be much easier and simpler than we make it; that the world might be a happier place than it is; that there is no need of struggles, convulsions, and despairs, of the wringing of the hands and the gnashing of the teeth; that we miscreate our own evils. We interfere with the optimism of nature; for, whenever we get this vantage-ground of the past, or of a wiser mind in the present, we are able to discern that we are begirt with laws which execute themselves.
The face of external nature teaches the same lesson. Nature will not have us fret and fume. She does not like our benevolence or our learning much better than she likes our frauds and wars. When we come out of the caucus, or the bank, or the Abolition-convention, or the Temperance-meeting, or the Transcendental club, into the fields and woods, she says to us, `So hot? my little Sir.’
We are full of mechanical actions. We must needs intermeddle, and have things in our own way, until the sacrifices and virtues of society are odious. Love should make joy; but our benevolence is unhappy. Our Sunday-schools, and churches, and pauper-societies are yokes to the neck. We pain ourselves to please nobody. There are natural ways of arriving at the same ends at which these aim, but do not arrive. Why should all virtue work in one and the same way? Why should all give dollars? It is very inconvenient to us country folk, and we do not think any good will come of it. We have not dollars; merchants have; let them give them. Farmers will give corn; poets will sing; women will sew; laborers will lend a hand; the children will bring flowers. And why drag this dead weight of a Sunday-school over the whole Christendom? It is natural and beautiful that childhood should inquire, and maturity should teach; but it is time enough to answer questions when they are asked. Do not shut up the young people against their will in a pew, and force the children to ask them questions for an hour against their will.
