Emerson, Journals
The record from the journals, in terms of education, offers little reflection on his actual teaching experience. But perhaps this means that we need to view his thinking on education much as any other topic: the journal is a place where he is working on and pulling out ideas that are transferable. This way, can read the journal for evidence of where some of the ideas on education begin.
In that sense, perhaps best educational value of journal is evidence/example of his composing process as itself a matter of education. And for use even as a potential model for pedagogy, if not a lesson plan on teaching emerson (and others) by way of their composing. And the irony that we have long taught these writers, but neglected the full force of the way they write, and its attending paradoxes. I am wondering if this is a larger issue of how we have received emerson on education—and neglected the more paradoxical implications of his thought. [could see parallels here between buell’s view on anti-mentoring built in to the philosophy; and sharon cameron on the radical implications of thoreau’s journal, resisting the reading.]
The scant mention of actual experience in the variety of classrooms comes off as support for the conclusion: emerson hated teaching; and fled school in his journal. I don’t know at this point if I can recover a more vital experience in the classroom, hidden somewhere. And don’t think that would be the issue anyway. For the sense is that emerson, in the very experience with teaching, could also be thought as beginning to work on his concerns for what and how ‘school’ is being defined—concerns that will begin to take shape in lectures and certainly in american scholar.
In this sense, might it be more accurate to say that he doesn’t flee school in the journal writing (and experimentation) so much as continue the experimentation (with writing and thinking) that will be the basis for his philosophy of education? Isn’t the journal prime evidence for the views of individual learning, unschooled, etc, that he will develop and define in a number of terms, most notably—self-reliance?
This begins to jibe with how he would discuss (recorded in Cabot) meeting years later with graduates of one of the schools and wishing that he had shared with them more of the inspiration that he was pursuing as a writer.
[jmn 2: xii, editor’s forward: ‘the journals and his reading a flight from or subsittute for life. Loathes his occupation, teaching adolescent girls.]
Note that even this quick note elides the experience—the range of schools he is teaching in and surely the experience (even if negative) he has there and tries to ‘translate into living thought’
JMN 5: 1835-8; starting with Journal B
See it begin with a focus on living preaching and the kind of concern for dead church the ties Divinity address with concern for living learning and American Scholar
Alcott
5.222 [october 1836] talked with mr. alcott of education.
Propose no methods, prepare no words… and the fit word will utter itself.
[links to view of thinking, passage on fit image [5.361]
5.328 highest genius of the time
5.63. read with delight the ‘record of a school’
Interest in its showing the symbolical cahracter; linked to statement: good writing and brilliant converstaion, are perpetual allegories.
5.98. his book is his school
5.175. [june 16 1836] Went to Alcott’s school
‘to truth is no age or season..’
This view that child can receive inspiration as much as any, ties to view from few days earlier that focuses on inspiration as larger reception of one mind [5.169]
5.176 visit alcott and you look at every thing from the point of education..
[could apply this to emerson’s writing—and thus to my project as well.
5.500. talked of alcott’s school. ‘unspoken influence’
AMERICAN EDUCATION
[7:11] ‘so deep ingrained in American Education’; ‘the plain prose of life’
Reading faces
BOOKS
[7:72] Not the fact avails but use you make of it…One book as good as the Bodleian Library
Next passage shows the complication of this—tying it to Emerson’s own work, and why we haven’t received from his ‘books’ a more formal philosophy of education
‘to say that which is not thought and said. That which he skipped is precisely that which it now concerns us to know.
So: apply this back to the pedagogy he is workin on—a vision of writing (and learning) as a kind of photographic negative? [tied to Cavell?]
Also note how surrounding passages focus on strangers and friendship—linked to the paradox of friendship he is also working on—cf 7:76, where we might view the ideal friendship/conversation as a model of ideal education—intruded upon by the defects of school conversation.
[7:80] greater is the man the less are books to him
7:207. alcott and Very: abhor books, old learning vs. new ideas/young scholars
5:343. office of readin is wholly subordinate
I get a vocabulary for my ideas. I get no ideas.
[thus language/vocabulary, tied to reading, is in tension with the reception, passivity of thinking—much as ‘do not determine what we will think]
But books “provoke thoughts”
Note how in these final days before AS, Emerson is not merely searching for a topic, but struggling with this very problem of books/vocabulary/language vs ‘ideas’ intellect, thinking. And so the issue is to recognize that the search for the vocabulary—and its transformation—is both necessary for learning, and constant.
[my book then needs to be a a new vocabulary, or its transformation, renaissance—but also one that resists the book.]
5:345. Yesterday went to Atheneum…books are but crutches.
Most direct statement of his search for the topic, as well as performance of the issue: books/topic/theme vs inspiration
Emerson feeling some of the despair/melancholy/shame that is associated with not trusting himself/voice within—as we get in SR—passage tied to this, p. 344: you will be forced to take with shame your own opinion from another. [so books another form of conformity; and learning in some sense the aversion to books/education?]
Use this as starting/end point for my proposed autobiographical essay on research emerson at Houghton?: emerson looking in the library through Journals and books
5:347. books are for scholar’s idle times
Must be able to read in all books one text of truth.
[interesting that emerson shifts from books to need to read text—textuality—a broader view of reading
5: 51 (1835). When we read a book in a foreign language…degree of remoteness from the line of things in the line of words
Focus on thought—how that is not a particular language/book. And language can only approximate, get us near
“refuse to be recorded”
[this view of thinking above our wills is connected on 5:94: receiving a thought contrasted with learning in college/school.]
[interesting that this view of thinking that resists language/recording is preceded by the “advantage in education is child who slip up into life.... Can tie to ‘education we receive from things,
Also followed up with how poetry/reason precedes understanding/prose.
CHILD
7:505. the experiments of the young child (Waldo cited) on grammar and language vs. a view of writing style today.
The idea of child experimentation actually being closer to the truth of language, vs. a view of correctness. Could tie this to a view of prescriptive vs. descriptive.
Also to a view of metonymy –the analogy—at the heart of language and learning: or what emerson means by metonymy.
[thinking about how birth of waldo is tied up with his emerging views/ideas of ‘creative reading—5. 234: form of reproduction]
5.178. refers to Alcott: whose focus is on the Whole: the mystery of the birth of a child.
5.180: refers to examples of Reason’s momentary revelation amidst understanding: the wisdom of children
181. Infancy is the perpetual messiah which comes into the arms
This preceded by : “it is the property of the divine to be reproductive. The harvest is seed.
[note emerson is reading at this time alcott’s conversations on the gospels
7:113. Waldo asks for a story; E sees this as evidence of a kind of natural origin for the novel
7:164: In dealing with my childe, my latin and Greeek stead me nothing.
COLLEGE
7:198. “My College”. Emerson’s vision for a college. Living Learning.
Note Alcott involved. Note also the preceding (196) entry that seems to continue the complaint against B. Frost and back to problem of the absense of life in learning/preaching
CONVERSATION
7:512. reference to fuller. Subterranean communication
EDUCATED
[7:54] educate men: believe in ideal standard, ‘faith in the possible improvement of man’
[thus education tied to ‘moral perfectionism’]
EDUCATION
7:237-240. sept. 14 1839
Begins in reflection on Mann’s Address on education.
Ties it to the preaching of all our pulpits, the consolation of stoicism
Then turns to the play on ‘convention’: death-cold [echoes of the way he refers to Frost]
An education in things is not: the passage from New england reformers and the lecture ‘education’
Thoreau: own hands vs the complaint ‘we cannot use our hands’
[use this passage to focus research into Mann and the conventions of education (and the reform movement), the coincidence of Mann’s work; as well as to link emerson’s focus on living learning with thoreau; a further link, to how he views the coldness of preaching/religion—frost.]
7:245. our Education is remote and accidental—we cannot understand children, treat them as foreigners.
But note this follows an entry on Friendship [whose theory emphasizes the inherent foreigness of relationship, remoteness. So is education implicated in how we relate. Not clear here that this is a complaint as much as a description of what education must be. [for example, later, 293: our moods do not believe in each other; thus the fundamental remoteness is our own—thus a fundamental circularity to education as well.
7:382. education aims to make man prevail over the circumstance.
7: 430. sub-heading “Education”: assume an air of holiness with children that is a fraud, not Holy spirit.
Interesting that it is followed by his thoughts for the ‘method of nature’ address. Thus education and spirit (and the problem of the times) tied to his views of method of nature.
7:432. demonstration of talent vs. education of man
Ties in to talent vs. genius—picked up on 442 [back to within vs. without].
7: 472 Drill of Latin and Greek became ‘stereotyped’ as Education.
Key focus: on ends. These are means not tied to ends. Seems to be an argument I could tie to dewey, ends in means.
7: 525. Education is in the work. My own hands [digging in his garden]
Thus can tie this to the passage with thoreau and farming.
5:50. The advantage in Education is always with those children who slip up into life without being objects of notice.
5:136. How important is the education of the Understanding
The continual reproduction of annoyances, routine—forming the common sense; the Hand of the Mind.
This view of the need to educate this hand of Mind/Reason is followed by discussion of analogy. 138: Man is analogist—reading/learning the whole in studying the one thing before him
[so Hand of mind as the arch-metonymy of emerson—not only how we learn but why: putting thoughts into action/execution.
5.296. Is not life a puny unprofitable discipline whose direct advantage may be fairly represented by the direct education that is got at Harvard college?
[suggests that the view that the failure to fix life—or determine our moods, etc—may best be represented in the education that fails to educate us.
Follow up passage: in life all finding is nto that thing we sought.
5.176. education can be carried on and perfected any where [refers to a greek phrase]
The parallel experience. If you study an ant hill… [similar view as in views of man as analogist/hand of man
8.120. [October, 1841, several pages after the Were you ever Dag?] Education among list of ‘causes’ [including abolition] “rapidly converted into a little shop where the article is made up in portable & convenient formas & retailed in small quantites to suit purchasers.
[note how on 119 he rejects abokitionism, perhaps a parallel for his views on how education is being reformed by Mann, etc.]
8.121: “sometimes we get our education ended a little too quick in this country.”
9.41: “Great are the dangers of education—skepticism.”
9.451 [for reunion of 1821 class of harvard]: ‘The <incessant> proceeding education of the class…”
10.15: “the necessity of the imagination in Education. We must have symbols”
INSIGHT
[7: 8] out of superficial existence and secular darkness [critique of the times, same tenor as in Providence address] comes our tuition and Insight—which he names ‘perfect education of the genius”
Gives sense not only of the criticism of the times, but the flip-side: of how education (moral) and intuition is tied to the tuition of the everyday, common
[used in literary ethics]
[7:29} Day creeps; prosaic and dust, yet a ‘fact is an Epiphany of God”
Intellect
5: 446. god is pure Intellect. Intellect regards its own being (I and mine) as foreign facts.
Compare to passage on waldo’s birth.
LEARNER/LEARNING
[7:80] we are by nature observers and so learners.
[7:96] a man should learn to fish, to plant..
7:115. I learn as much from the sick, the insane.
7: 198. Living Learning [emerson’s vision of a college]
5: 231-2. our learning from nature…god plants a field and builds a school.
[note: next entry is the origin of ‘when the mind is braced by …creative reading/focus on plagiarism
So perhaps nature as a model for learning that is both reproduction but also original—evident in the line on 233 following it: very few substances are found pure in nature
5:361. This is the way to learnGrammar. God never meant that we should learn Language by Colleges or Books.
Passage for AS is mixed with passage from “intellect”—whole series of natural images/dark chamber [echoes of photo reproduction]. Here the analogy applied to language. Thus continues his thinking of creativity/reading in terms of reproduction (and in terms of lived experience). Note that here the indictment against traditional learning is clear
[note that these passages in days before AS include reference to Alcott—362) and Emerson’s wish to have a record/report of the discourse/conversation. Perhaps a further view of the way to learn grammar vs. learning in books. Certainly a transifguration of the ‘grammar’ of learning/schooling. Also note implications that tie it to Divinity: perahcer who deals in words, not speaking in things—361]
SCHOLAR
[7:40] the scholar’s vocation: not to have written a book, but, ‘yet to be written’
[used in LitEthics]
Note this this comes in the midst of discussion of soul and during time of Divinity address. So links between the view of scholar/genius and understanding of ongoing revelation [p. 42: refers to his Divinity address in progress.
[7:50] A scholar is a selecting principle: Perceiver and Recorder
[7:60]: reiterates: true scholar is ‘merely an observer, a dispassionate reporter’
One-year anniversrary of Phi beta kappa address
[7:69] ‘Wordsworth to the scholar: “Leave your old books…pedantic cartloads of grammars..’
[7:105] the Scholar should deal plainly with society
Focus on taunts and cries, consequences from society—implications of reaction to Divinity?
7:118. Response to Divinity school criticism [entry titled ‘scholar’]. By and by will come a reader/age that will justify your context
Thus another version of the problem of being misunderstood—linked to the problem of reading education in emerson, of anti-mentoring [controversy as a key in what teaching is about?]
7: 130. Mob of so-called scholars.. unlearned and unintelligent
5:116. power to stand beside his thoughts…converts facts into trees of life by suggesting principle which classifies the facts….We build sepulchres
[note that this famous line is in context of scholar’s office, converting and working with invisible tools—passage begins with lament that scholar is viewed as idler, not laboring.
5: 164, 165. plans for a “Sermon to Scholars”
5:232-33. [origin of ‘creative reading’ passage]
Very plagiarism to which scholars incline arises out of one Mind.
Here the sense of plagiarism is acceptable—the necessary repeating/quotation. Note that this fits in with the views of learning from nature surrounding this passage
And the next page: quotation on ‘education’ and entry on birth of his son—as emerson’s example of reproduction? His mind braced by labor?—the picture of reading as reproduction—both in terms of reading nature (reading chemistry—reproduction/experiment) and reading himself (his own work—preparing for lectures) and reading/seeing himself in the alien form of the child
Tied to views of reading, learning, teaching; taking the creation of ‘creative reading’ seriously; double sense of ‘composition’
[note 5:320. goes on to discuss ‘creation is genius’ and the passage from AS on the hourly conversion of facts and events—including cradle and infancy, school and playground—so conversion as a form of the creative reading as reproduction?
5:364. theory of Scholar’s function/hope to arouse young men at Cambridge.
To arouse the intellect
Thus his planned address is itself a teaching—doing, arousing, what it is the scholar is to do—and what schools should be doing.
Note also the implication that the failure to make this record—or the dnager of making a record, pinning it down, is a key: so emerson and his struggle to find this topic and deal with it is very much key to the topic. Perhaps this problem relates to the importance of the topic throughout his work, but also why it is hard to pin down.
Pinned to their thinking.
366: the secret of the scholar—seeing every part in nature as emblem/sign/fact of the soul
Thus focus on the ‘near’ explaining the far [relates it back to passage on birth of son]
Note section on books from 5: 343 ff—also in days before AS
SCHOOL
[7:76] by keeping house I go to a universal school where all knowledges are taught
Tied to the common; also implicitly to his view of hands/trades
5:94 (1835). My will never gave the images…reciving a thought.
Contrasted with the ‘four college years’ and learning at Latin School, vs idle books under bench—used in Spiritual laws
So reception vs. schooling
5.330 Schools everywhere
Passage that begins in focus on the partiality of man; there are no men [sounds like man thinking vs. mere thinker] the deep and entire man.
Then turns to how it is thus fit that reformer/idealist contrasts the despair of the ideal in the actual in terms of schools.
[so: views of despair and cavellian perfectionism here tied directly to critique of schools.]
5.469. keeping school, teacher must make ‘frank and hearty expression of himself’
Refers to GP Bradford and GB emerson.
‘he must find in that an outlet for his character, so that he may justify hiself to their minds..
Communicating the teachers interest/character
Compare to his view of alcott[5.99]: his book is his school
5.496. Mere verbal learning of school and church
SELF-RELIANCE
7: 201-202. a great genius must come and preach self-reliance.
Refers to Thoreau: he does not postpone his life but lives already.
Then, ‘no history only biography’; idolaters of the old.
So the issues of imitating past (from self-reliance and history) are here tied up with the implications of education/learning—living learning [note thoreau also implicated in the later passage on convention of education (238)—thus the double-sense of ‘convention’
SPIRIT
7:66-7. link between spirit and school [passage used in ‘School” and ‘Over-Soul”
Here begun by questions emerson hears at “Teacher’s meetings”—connected perhaps to the Middlesex Association that meets at his house {and includes alcott?]
STUDENT
5.498. why we recommend solitued/silence to student: that he may become acquainted with his thoughts.
SYSTEM [METHOD]
7:302. I have no system
Could apply this understanding of all his writing/thinking (tied to his views of intellect and ‘we do not determine what we think’) with why there is no educational system. Not only that it is just another name for everything else; but also that the issue of learning and literacy is itself shifted to process.
TEACHER
7:111. Aim of a true teacher: teach the doctrine of perpetual revelation (bring men back to a trust in God)
7: 157. Ab intra vs. ab extra.
Tied to views of preaching and genius (vs talent)—the personal and private [thus makes sense of implications of teaching in the Frost passages]
9.449 [aug 1846]. ‘The teacher should be the complement of the pupil
TEACHING
[7:75] What teaching or book of today appeals to the Vast?
5.408 [oct 1837]
Reference to Pestalozzi’s school, the importance of mutual instruction
‘to receive instruction of another teacher each being thus in turn teacher and pupil’
Formal not real teaching
THOREAU
5.453-4. told thoreau he should write out the history of his college life.
Seeing the stars worth all the astronomical lectures.
