Education: An Essay and Other Selections

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

This volume presents the views of Ralph Waldo Emerson regarding education. It consists of his entire essay on "Education," and several additional selections from his other writings. By no means a complete exposition of his philosophy of education, the material presents his fundamental beliefs with regard to the proper aims and methods which should be pursued in the liberal training of men and women. With rare penetration the essayist reveals the essential nature of the problems which everywhere arise in the effort to train men. In these days when we are necessarily so largely engaged in adding to our traditional education a system of specialized vocational training in the industrial, agricultural, and commercial arts, there is a danger that we shall lose our sense of proportion, forgetting the full significance of that older liberal education which is designed to equip man for the finer uses of his manhood and his citizenship. There is no better brief for a broad, human education than that presented in the writings of Emerson. Our best American apostle of culture, he notes with precision the qualities which are the measure of a truly cultivated man. With high critical power, he describes the futility and the narrowness of much that goes under the guise of human training in the schools, and ably defends the larger cause of spiritual development, despite the failures to achieve it in the classroom. When sharp competition forces us to a serious consideration of a school training for bread winning, it is well to be told that the glorified word efficiency means spiritual efficiency as much as economic competency.

Paperback

First published May 1, 2003

About the author

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston in 1803. Educated at Harvard and the Cambridge Divinity School, he became a Unitarian minister in 1826 at the Second Church Unitarian. The congregation, with Christian overtones, issued communion, something Emerson refused to do. "Really, it is beyond my comprehension," Emerson once said, when asked by a seminary professor whether he believed in God. (Quoted in 2,000 Years of Freethought edited by Jim Haught.) By 1832, after the untimely death of his first wife, Emerson cut loose from Unitarianism. During a year-long trip to Europe, Emerson became acquainted with such intelligentsia as British writer Thomas Carlyle, and poets Wordsworth and Coleridge. He returned to the United States in 1833, to a life as poet, writer and lecturer. Emerson inspired Transcendentalism, although never adopting the label himself. He rejected traditional ideas of deity in favor of an "Over-Soul" or "Form of Good," ideas which were considered highly heretical. His books include Nature (1836), The American Scholar (1837), Divinity School Address (1838), Essays, 2 vol. (1841, 1844), Nature, Addresses and Lectures (1849), and three volumes of poetry. Margaret Fuller became one of his "disciples," as did Henry David Thoreau.

The best of Emerson's rather wordy writing survives as epigrams, such as the famous: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." Other one- (and two-) liners include: "As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect" (Self-Reliance, 1841). "The most tedious of all discourses are on the subject of the Supreme Being" (Journal, 1836). "The word miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is a monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain" (Address to Harvard Divinity College, July 15, 1838). He demolished the right wing hypocrites of his era in his essay "Worship": ". . . the louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons" (Conduct of Life, 1860). "I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship" (Self-Reliance). "The first and last lesson of religion is, 'The things that are seen are temporal; the things that are not seen are eternal.' It puts an affront upon nature" (English Traits , 1856). "The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant." (Civilization, 1862). He influenced generations of Americans, from his friend Henry David Thoreau to John Dewey, and in Europe, Friedrich Nietzsche, who takes up such Emersonian themes as power, fate, the uses of poetry and history, and the critique of Christianity. D. 1882.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was his son and Waldo Emerson Forbes, his grandson.