Emerson education questions on rhetoric and style answers

Reading Response In One Paragraph

Summarize Emerson’s ideas about what he calls “Genius and Drill,” his ideas about respecting the student, nature, and patience.
Then, write a detailed paraphrase of paragraph 15 (“I confess myself utterly at a loss”) on p. 10.
What do you think of the ideas in that paragraph?

RALPH WALDO EMERSON On Education

RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803–1882) was among the foremost American

intellectuals of the nineteenth century. His father, a Unitarian minister, settled the family in Concord, Massachusetts, where Emerson lived virtually all his life. When his father died, Emerson was seven years old, and his mother was essentially destitute. She worked at various jobs to keep the family together, but there were nights when they did not have enough to eat. Emerson’s maiden aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, was a highly intelligent woman and was responsible, in part, for Emerson’s earliest education.

Despite having little or no money, Emerson went to Boston Latin School, then enrolled in Harvard at age fourteen. After graduation he taught briefly at an uncle’s school, then opened his own school for girls, which he operated for about four years. Eventually he realized that teaching was not the right vocation for him, and he decided to become a minister. He went to Harvard Divinity School but found he had difficulty accepting the religious dogma at the heart of the program. He continued to have a problem with religious strictures, and even though he became a popular Unitarian minister in Boston, he eventually gave up his career in the church.

What he decided to do instead was to become a lecturer and public speaker. In the years before and after the Civil War (1861–1865), many speakers toured the United States almost the way popular entertainers do today. Emerson was a popular intellectual whose style of delivery and quality of thought engaged New Englanders for decades. He was known in Europe as well, where he visited thinkers and absorbed ideas from the new wave of Romantic philosophy that emanated primarily from Germany. He thought of himself as an Idealist, although he was involved with a group of intellectuals who described themselves as Transcendentalists.

Transcendentalism was not a systematic philosophy, but a way of approaching life by emphasizing the human soul, the soul’s connection with nature, and the elevation of the spirit over materialism. Considering that the United States was enjoying a tremendous wave of materialist expansion during his lifetime, his views were what we would today call countercultural. His first book, Nature (1836), was a short tribute to his love of nature, especially his love of the woods around Concord. Some commentators hold that most of his later beliefs are either expressed or hinted at in this volume. Emerson praised freedom, intuition, respect for conscience, spontaneity, and personal responsibility, among other values. For Emerson, to praise something as “natural” was high praise indeed.

Like his neighbor Henry David Thoreau, Emerson campaigned against slavery and, during the Civil War, lobbied Washington to emancipate the slaves. He was a lifelong abolitionist and, again like Thoreau, refused to recognize laws that he felt went against nature. For instance, when Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which would force him to turn in any escaped slave that he found, he declared that he would disobey the law.

Emerson produced a large body of work. His journal, begun when he was

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student at Harvard, was later published. His two volumes of Essays (1841 and 1844) were and are widely read and studied. His essays “Self-Reliance,” “The Over-Soul,” and “The American Scholar” are among the most important American literary documents of the nineteenth century. His two volumes of poetry, Poems (1847) and May–Day (1867), include several memorable poems, such as “Hamatreya,” that reveal the influence of Eastern religious thought and the character of his idealism. Other books include Representative Men (1850)—short biographies of men such as Shakespeare, Goethe, and Napoleon; and The Conduct of Life (1860), which examines the way in which he himself lived while recognizing his limitations and his personal gifts.

Emerson’s Rhetoric

“On Education” was originally a commencement address given to graduating classes,

and Emerson delivered it often during the 1860s. It was not published until after his death—in part, probably, because it would not be useful to him as a speech if it were widely available in print. And because it is a speech, Emerson is a bit more direct in his presentation than he would have been in a closely argued essay in which he could depend on the reader’s close attention to detail. As a result, it is among Emerson’s more approachable essays.

The selection that follows is the second part of Emerson’s speech. The first part begins with a discussion of the experiment in education that marked the United States: the provision of a free public education for every child. Emerson felt this to be an idealistic venture, but he welcomed it, although he also saw that it created profound problems. For Emerson, educating the masses meant slighting the individual. Emerson worried that an individual’s genius, or special gifts, would be ignored in such a system. In the second part of his speech, he begins to be more specific about his concerns and recommendations for education. He may have intended to address young teachers, because he pauses occasionally to make suggestions for classroom decorum. He refers to students constantly as boys or men, but this does not mean he ignores education for women. He was, after all, the proprietor of a school dedicated to the training of women, and he was also a feminist. However, at the time Emerson wrote this speech, only men went on to university. As much as he was an idealist, he was also realistic.

Emerson begins by praising imagination and suggesting that whatever the content of the classroom, there ought to be room for good novels and good poetry. In Emerson’s time the power of poetry was considerable, and he names a number of important poets whom he feels students ought to know primarily as a stimulus to their imagination, which he felt was important to develop.

Emerson states that “the secret of Education lies in respecting the pupil” (para. 2). He implies that every pupil will have a special ability, a special character, a special curiosity, and that teachers must do what they can to respect this individuality. He also

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realizes that while it is important to retain the student’s natural abilities, the teacher’s responsibility is to “stop off his uproar,” which is to say, be sure to maintain peace in the classroom and not let the students run wild.

In paragraph 4, Emerson emphasizes the “two capital facts, Genius and Drill.” Both are part of good education. Find the genius of the student, but engage him in the kind of drill that excites. Otherwise, the basics of mathematics and science, two of Emerson’s pleasures, will not be learned. His advice to children is find a subject that inspires them and then follow it until it is mastered.

In paragraph 5, Emerson uses the rhetorical device of example. He points to the explorer Sir Charles Fellowes (1799–1860), who became curious about the carvings on ancient stone that he found in Turkey, in a region called Lycia. Because he was excited by his discoveries, he learned new languages and read history in order to make better sense out of what he had found. The result of this enthusiasm was the discovery of the capital city, Xanthus, of an ancient settlement. In his expeditions he discovered several more cities and sent various ancient stone structures back to England.

One of Emerson’s techniques, repetition (or drill), is plain in the central paragraphs of his speech when he praises nature for providing all that is necessary for good learning and good instruction. As he states in paragraph 9, the process begins at the mother’s knee, with the child excited to learn and the adult just as excited to teach. The process of education, he reminds us in several ways, is essentially natural, and if what is natural in students is respected, then education will take place naturally.

In paragraphs 9–12, Emerson points to several problems with education as it currently exists. He complains that in most classrooms there are few geniuses and many who “are more sensual than intellectual” (para. 11). What happens in a large classroom is that the instruction is geared to the lowest common denominator, and hence the individual is sometimes ignored or made dull. Unfortunately, that situation can produce a discouraged teacher, one who may become “military” and more a disciplinarian than a teacher. In Emerson’s day, corporal punishment was the norm in most schools. Students could be hit with a pandy bat for not knowing their lessons or for causing a disturbance.

Emerson’s ultimate remedy, also “drilled” into his speech, is patience. Things in nature take more time than some of us are willing to give. But at the end of his speech, Emerson characteristically reverts to nature and reminds us that things take their own time and that the essence of good teaching is to be patient. The same may be said of good learning.

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PREREADING QUESTIONS: WHAT TO READ FOR

The following prereading questions may help you anticipate key issues in the discussion of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “On Education.” Keeping them in mind during your first reading of the selection should help focus your attention.

• What does Emerson mean when he states that “the secret of Education lies in

respecting the pupil” (para. 2)? • What role does nature have in education? • What does Emerson mean by Genius and Drill

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On Education

There comes the period of the imagination to each, a later youth; the power of beauty, the power of books, of poetry. Culture makes his books realities to him, their characters more brilliant, more effective on his mind, than his actual mates. Do not spare to put novels into the hands of young people as an occasional holiday and experiment; but, above all, good poetry in all kinds, epic, tragedy, lyric. If we can touch the imagination, we serve them, they will never forget it. Let him read Tom Brown at Rugby, read Tom Brown at Oxford,—better yet, read Hodson’s Life1—Hodson who took prisoner the King of Delhi. They teach the same truth—a trust, against all appearances, against all privations, in your own worth, and not in tricks, plotting, or patronage.

I believe that our own experience instructs us that the secret of Education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained, and he only holds the key to his own secret. By your tampering and thwarting and too much governing he may be hindered from his end and kept out of his own. Respect the child. Wait and see the new product of Nature. Nature loves analogies, but not repetitions. Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.

But I hear the outcry which replies to this suggestion—Would you verily throw up the reins of public and private discipline; would you leave the young child to the mad career of his own passions and whimsies, and call this anarchy a respect for the child’s nature? I answer— Respect the child, respect him to the end, but also respect yourself. Be the companion of his thought, the friend of his friendship, the lover of his virtue—but no kinsman of his sin. Let him find you so true to yourself that you are the irreconcilable hater of his vice and the imperturbable slighter of his trifling.

The two points in a boy’s training are, to keep his naturel2 and train off all but that—to keep his naturel, but stop off his uproar, fooling and horseplay—keep his nature and arm it with knowledge in the very direction in which it points. Here are the two capital facts, Genius and Drill. The first is the inspiration in the well-born healthy child, the new perception he has of nature. Somewhat he sees in forms or hears in music or apprehends in mathematics, or believes practicable in mechanics or possible in political society, which no one else sees or hears or believes. This is the perpetual romance of new life, the invasion of God into the old dead world, when he sends into quiet houses a young soul with a thought which is not met, looking for something which is not there, but which ought to be there: the thought is dim but it is sure, and he casts about restless for means and masters to verify it; he makes wild attempts to explain himself and invoke the aid and consent of the by-standers. Baffled for want of language and methods to convey his meaning, not yet clear to himself, he conceives that though not in this house or town, yet in some other house or town is the wise master who can put him in possession of the rules and instruments to execute his will. Happy this child with a bias, with a thought

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which entrances him, leads him, now into deserts now into cities, the fool of an idea. Let him follow it in good and in evil report, in good or bad company; it will justify itself; it will lead him at last into the illustrious society of the lovers of truth.

In London, in a private company, I became acquainted with a gentleman, Sir Charles Fellowes, who, being at Xanthus, in the Aegean Sea, had seen a Turk point with his staff to some carved work on the corner of a stone almost buried in the soil. Fellowes scraped away the dirt, was struck with the beauty of the sculptured ornaments, and, looking about him, observed more blocks and fragments like this. He returned to the spot, procured laborers and uncovered many blocks. He went back to England, bought a Greek grammar and learned the language; he read history and studied ancient art to explain his stones; he interested Gibson3 the sculptor; he invoked the assistance of the English Government; he called in the succor of Sir Humphry Davy4 to analyze the pigments; of experts in coins, of scholars and connoisseurs; and at last in his third visit brought home to England such statues and marble reliefs and such careful plans that he was able to reconstruct, in the British Museum where it now stands, the perfect model of the Ionic trophy-monument, fifty years older than the Parthenon of Athens, and which had been destroyed by earthquakes, then by iconoclast Christians, then by savage Turks. But mark that in the task he had achieved an excellent education, and become associated with distinguished scholars whom he had interested in his pursuit; in short, had formed a college for himself; the enthusiast had found the master, the masters, whom he sought. Always genius seeks genius, desires nothing so much as to be a pupil and to find those who can lend it aid to perfect itself.

Nor are the two elements, enthusiasm and drill, incompatible. Accuracy is essential to beauty. The very definition of the intellect is Aristotle’s: “that by which we know terms or boundaries.” Give a boy accurate perceptions. Teach him the difference between the similar and the same. Make him call things by their right names. Pardon in him no blunder. Then he will give you solid satisfaction as long as he lives. It is better to teach the child arithmetic and Latin grammar than rhetoric or moral philosophy, because they require exactitude of performance; it is made certain that the lesson is mastered, and that power of performance is worth more than the knowledge. He can learn anything which is important to him now that the power to learn is secured: as mechanics say, when one has learned the use of tools, it is easy to work at a new craft.

Letter by letter, syllable by syllable, the child learns to read, and in good time can convey to all the domestic circle the sense of Shakspeare [sic]. By many steps each just as short, the stammering boy and the hesitating collegian, in the school debate, in college clubs, in mock court, comes at last to full, secure, triumphant unfolding of his thought in the popular assembly, with a fullness of power that makes all the steps forgotten.

But this function of opening and feeding the human mind is not to be fulfilled by any mechanical or military method; is not to be trusted to any skill less large than Nature itself. You must not neglect the form, but you must secure the essentials. It is curious

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how perverse and intermeddling we are, and what vast pains and cost we incur to do wrong. Whilst we all know in our own experience and apply natural methods in our own business—in education our common sense fails us, and we are continually trying costly machinery against nature, in patent schools and academies and in great colleges and universities.

The natural method forever confutes our experiments, and we must still come back to it. The whole theory of the school is on the nurse’s or mother’s knee. The child is as hot to learn as the mother is to impart. There is mutual delight. The joy of our childhood in hearing beautiful stories from some skilful aunt who loves to tell them, must be repeated in youth. The boy wishes to learn to skate, to coast, to catch a fish in the brook, to hit a mark with a snowball or a stone; and a boy a little older is just as well pleased to teach him these sciences. Not less delightful is the mutual pleasure of teaching and learning the secret of algebra, or of chemistry, or of good reading and good recitation of poetry or of prose, or of chosen facts in history or in biography.

Nature provided for the communication of thought, by planting with it in the receiving mind a fury to impart it. ’Tis so in every art, in every science. One burns to tell the new fact, the other burns to hear it. See how far a young doctor will ride or walk to witness a new surgical operation. I have seen a carriage-maker’s shop emptied of all its workmen into the street, to scrutinize a new pattern from New York. So in literature, the young man who has taste for poetry, for fine images, for noble thoughts, is insatiable for this nourishment, and forgets all the world for the more learned friend—who finds equal joy in dealing out his treasures.

Happy the natural college thus self-instituted around every natural teacher; the young men of Athens around Socrates; of Alexandria around Plotinus; of Paris around Abelard; of Germany around Fichte, or Niebuhr, or Goethe:5 in short the natural sphere of every leading mind. But the moment this is organized, difficulties begin. The college was to be the nurse and home of genius; but, though every young man is born with some determination in his nature, and is a potential genius; is at last to be one; it is, in the most, obstructed and delayed, and, whatever they may here after be, their senses are now opened in advance of their minds. They are more sensual than intellectual. Appetite and indolence they have, but no enthusiasm. These come in numbers to the college: few geniuses: and the teaching comes to be arranged for these many, and not for those few. Hence the instruction seems to require skilful tutors, of accurate and systematic mind, rather than ardent and inventive masters. Besides, the youth of genius are eccentric, won’t drill, are irritable, uncertain, explosive, solitary, not men of the world, not good for every- day association. You have to work for large classes instead of individuals; you must lower your flag and reef your sails to wait for the dull sailors; you grow departmental, routinary, military almost with your discipline and college police. But what doth such a school to form a great and heroic character? What abiding Hope can it inspire? What Reformer will it nurse? What poet will it breed to sing to the human race? What

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discoverer of Nature’s laws will it prompt to enrich us by disclosing in the mind the statute which all matter must obey? What fiery soul will it send out to warm a nation with his charity? What tranquil mind will it have fortified to walk with meekness in private and obscure duties, to wait and to suffer? Is it not manifest that our academic institutions should have a wider scope; that they should not be timid and keep the ruts of the last generation, but that wise men thinking for themselves and heartily seeking the good of mankind, and counting the cost of innovation, should dare to arouse the young to a just and heroic life; that the moral nature should be addressed in the school-room, and children should be treated as the high-born candidates of truth and virtue?

So to regard the young child, the young man, requires, no doubt, rare patience: a patience that nothing but faith in the remedial forces of the soul can give. You see his sensualism; you see his want of those tastes and perceptions which make the power and safety of your character. Very likely. But he has something else. If he has his own vice, he has its correlative virtue. Every mind should be allowed to make its own statement in action, and its balance will appear. In these judgments one needs that foresight which was attributed to an eminent reformer, of whom it was said “his patience could see in the bud of the aloe the blossom at the end of a hundred years.” Alas for the cripple Practice when it seeks to come up with the bird Theory, which flies before it. Try your design on the best school. The scholars are of all ages and temperaments and capacities. It is difficult to class them, some are too young, some are slow, some perverse. Each requires so much consideration, that the morning hope of the teacher, of a day of love and progress, is often closed at evening by despair. Each single case, the more it is considered, shows more to be done; and the strict conditions of the hours, on one side, and the number of tasks, on the other. Whatever becomes of our method, the conditions stand fast—six hours, and thirty, fifty, or a hundred and fifty pupils. Something must be done, and done speedily, and in this distress the wisest are tempted to adopt violent means, to proclaim martial law, corporal punishment, mechanical arrangement, bribes, spies, wrath, main strength and ignorance, in lieu of that wise genial providential influence they had hoped, and yet hope at some future day to adopt. Of course the devotion to details reacts injuriously on the teacher. He cannot indulge his genius, he cannot delight in personal relations with young friends, when his eye is always on the clock, and twenty classes are to be dealt with before the day is done. Besides, how can he please himself with genius, and foster modest virtue? A sure proportion of rogue and dunce finds its way into every school and requires a cruel share of time, and the gentle teacher, who wished to be a Providence to youth, is grown a martinet, sore with suspicions; knows as much vice as the judge of a police court, and his love of learning is lost in the routine of grammars and books of elements.

A rule is so easy that it does not need a man to apply it; an automaton, a machine, can be made to keep a school so. It facilitates labor and thought so much that there is always the temptation in large schools to omit the endless task of meeting the wants of

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each single mind, and to govern by steam. But it is at frightful cost. Our modes of Education aim to expedite, to save labor; to do for masses what cannot be done for masses, what must be done reverently, one by one: say rather, the whole world is needed for the tuition of each pupil. The advantages of this system of emulation and display are so prompt and obvious, it is such a time-saver, it is so energetic on slow and on bad natures, and is of so easy application, needing no sage or poet, but any tutor or schoolmaster in his first term can apply it—that it is not strange that this calomel6 of culture should be a popular medicine. On the other hand, total abstinence from his drug, and the adoption of simple discipline and the following of nature, involves at once immense claims on the time, the thoughts, on the life of the teacher. It requires time, use, insight, event, all the great lessons and assistances of God; and only to think of using it implies character and profoundness; to enter on this course of discipline is to be good and great. It is precisely analogous to the difference between the use of corporal punishment and the methods of love. It is so easy to bestow on a bad boy a blow, overpower him, and get obedience without words, that in this world of hurry and distraction, who can wait for the returns of reason and the conquest of self; in the uncertainty too whether that will ever come? And yet the familiar observation of the universal compensations might suggest the fear that so summary a stop of a bad humor was more jeopardous than its continuance.

Now the correction of this quack practice is to import into Education the wisdom of life. Leave this military hurry and adopt the pace of Nature. Her secret is patience. Do you know how the naturalist learns all the secrets of the forest, of plants, of birds, of beasts, of reptiles, of fishes, of the rivers and the sea? When he goes into the woods the birds fly before him and he finds none; when he goes to the river bank, the fish and the reptile swim away and leave him alone. His secret is patience; he sits down, and sits still; he is a statue; he is a log. These creatures have no value for their time, and he must put as low a rate on his. By dint of obstinate sitting still, reptile, fish, bird and beast, which all wish to return to their haunts, begin to return. He sits still; if they approach, he remains passive as the stone he sits upon. They lose their fear. They have curiosity too about him. By and by the curiosity masters the fear, and they come swimming, creeping and flying towards him; and as he is still immovable, they not only resume their haunts and their ordinary labors and manners, show themselves to him in their work-day trim, but also volunteer some degree of advances towards fellowship and good understanding with a biped who behaves so civilly and well. Can you not baffle the impatience and passion of the child by your tranquility? Can you not wait for him, as Nature and Providence do? Can you not keep for his mind and ways, for his secret, the same curiosity you give to the squirrel, snake, rabbit, and the sheldrake and the deer? He has a secret; wonderful methods in him; he is—every child—a new style of man; give him time and opportunity. Talk of Columbus and Newton!7 I tell you the child just born in yonder hovel is the beginning of a revolution as great as theirs. But you must have the believing and prophetic eye. Have the self- command you wish to inspire. Your teaching and discipline

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must have the reserve and taciturnity of Nature. Teach them to hold their tongues by holding your own. Say little; do not snarl; do not chide; but govern by the eye. See what they need, and that the right thing is done.

I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching. No discretion that can be lodged with a school-committee, with the overseers or visitors of an academy, of a college, can at all avail to reach these difficulties and perplexities, but they solve themselves when we leave institutions and address individuals. The will, the male power, organizes, imposes its own thought and wish on others, and makes that military eye which controls boys as it controls men; admirable in its results, a fortune to him who has it, and only dangerous when it leads the workman to overvalue and overuse it and precludes him from finer means. Sympathy, the female force—which they must use who have not the first— deficient in instant control and the breaking down of resistance, is more subtle and lasting and creative. I advise teachers to cherish mother-wit. I assume that you will keep the grammar, reading, writing and arithmetic in order; ’tis easy and of course you will. But smuggle in a little contraband wit, fancy, imagination, thought. If you have a taste which you have suppressed because it is not shared by those about you, tell them that. Set this law up, whatever becomes of the rules of the school: they must not whisper, much less talk; but if one of the young people says a wise thing, greet it, and let all the children clap their hands. They shall have no book but school-books in the room; but if one has brought in a Plutarch or Shakspeare or Don Quixote or Goldsmith8 or any other good book, and understands what he reads, put him at once at the head of the class. Nobody shall be disorderly, or leave his desk without permission, but if a boy runs from his bench, or a girl, because the fire falls, or to check some injury that a little dastard is inflicting behind his desk on some helpless sufferer, take away the medal from the head of the class and give it on the instant to the brave rescuer. If a child happens to show that he knows any fact about astronomy, or plants, or birds, or rocks, or history, that interests him and you, hush all the classes and encourage him to tell it so that all may hear. Then you have made your school-room like the world. Of course you will insist on modesty in the children, and respect to their teachers, but if the boy stops you in your speech, cries out that you are wrong and sets you right, hug him!

To whatsoever upright mind, to whatsoever beating heart I speak, to you it is committed to educate men. By simple living, by an illimitable soul, you inspire, you correct, you instruct, you raise, you embellish all. By your own act you teach the beholder how to do the practicable. According to the depth from which you draw your life, such is the depth not only of your strenuous effort, but of your manners and presence.

The beautiful nature of the world has here blended your happiness with your power. Work straight on in absolute duty, and you lend an arm and an encouragement to all the youth of the universe. Consent yourself to be an organ of your highest thought, and

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lo! suddenly you put all men in your debt, and are the fountain of an energy that goes pulsing on with waves of benefit to the borders of society, to the circumference of things.

1 Thomas Hughes wrote the Tom Brown’s Schooldays books (1865) detailing his schooling at Rugby, an English private school, and at Oxford University. W. S. R. Hodson wrote Twelve Years of a Soldier’s Life in India (1860). They remained popular books well into the twentieth century 2 naturel By this Emerson means the basic nature of the student 3 John Gibson (1790–1866) Member of the Royal Academy and prominent Victorian sculptor who worked in marble. See “Emerson’s Rhetoric” (pp. 248–250) for more information on Sir Charles Fellowes 4 Sir Humphry Davy (1778–1829) An important chemist capable of analyzing the pigments in question 5 Socrates … Goethe All these men were teachers who drew students to them. Socrates (469–399 b.c.e.); Plotinus (C.E. 205–270); Peter Abelard (1079–1142); Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762– 1814); Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776–1831); Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) were all among the intellectual influences on Emerson and his time 6 calomel A medicinal powder used to induce vomiting 7 Two great discoverers: Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) discovered the New World, and Isaac Newton (1642–1727) discovered the laws of gravity 8 Four important writers of biography, drama, fiction, and poetry: Plutarch (46–120 c.e.), William Shakespeare (1564–1616), Mignel de Cervantes (1547–1616), Oliver Goldsmith (1730–1774)