16 March // Transcendentalists, Learning & Unschooling

Not to advertise this fact too loudly...but I have a pretty big crush on the Transcendentalists.

It's been going on since I was in my early teens; I remember reading Thoreau's Walden and Emerson's Nature for the first time as part of a homeschooling summer reading group, underneath the apple trees in my backyard. Before I had really experienced life and could even fully understand what they were talking about, I was deeply drawn to their way of perceiving the world and how they chose to interact with it. Passages like these (all from Emerson's Nature) permanently captured my imagination:

"To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches." (Emerson, Nature)

"In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line." (Thoreau, Walden)

"To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood." (Emerson, Nature)

"The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred million to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?" (Thoreau, Walden)

For a homeschooler raised in Appalachia, this was the essence of my educational life. We had tried strict homeschooling with our small group for the first few years, but gradually everyone seemingly fell into unschooling; a discipline which stresses supporting and encouraging children in their natural ability to educate themselves. Parents moved away from the pedanticism and pedagogies of institutionalized education, instead allowing their children free reign to experience the natural and sensual world. Unschoolers believe that the inherent interests and curiosities of children naturally lead to a quest for the knowledge necessary to perpetuate those skills and desires.

To give an example: since all knowledge is connected (not naturally separated into neat disciplines and categorizations), eating a particularly delicious apple pie could lead an Unschooling child to study historic recipes and cooking traditions stretching back to ancient Persia...or to research the organic structure of ingredients and chemical reactions that occur in baking...or to fractional mathematics involved in doubling and reducing recipes...or to the agricultural roots of tree propagation and pollination...or to consume particularly beautiful works of literature and art regarding a sensual appreciation of foodstuffs...all these are possibilities. Perhaps a precipitating interest could lead to a more abiding passion, where a child learn they love culinary arts or organic chemistry. However, all these wonderful options stem from a precipitating interaction with a natural experience that is child-like and pure.

This freedom of educational thought and experience in the natural world is the direct descendant of the Transcendentalists, who were the first to stand up to the experiential limitations of historic educational institutions. It's a lesson I've internalized to the point that it is incredibly hard for me as a college student to go back to the standard divisions and discipline of education. To this day I find disconnected and dry lectures limp, disciplinary distinctions ridiculous and deadlines/busywork/limitations suffocatingly restrictive. There have been times in recent years where I have skipped lectures because the bloodless and uninspiring group dissection of a reading would take the color out of it forever for me. (Most recently a dispassionate group discussion session with three people who hated Mrs. Dalloway, one of my favorite novels ever.) Over the years I have taken a lot of flack for this, but it's become something so intrinsic to me that I don't know if I could change to this other way of operating, let alone if I would even want to.

Walt Whitman has a lovely poem that I think captures the essence of this feeling:

When I heard the learn'd astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.