“We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten to fifteen years, and come out at last with a belly full of words and do not know a thing."
In 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882) delivered a resounding commencement address to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard University entitled “The American Scholar” in which he remarks:
Education gives us two capacities: a capacity to feel hope in the activities of others and a capacity for communication with others.
Perhaps this end of education - that a student feels hopeful about existence and can communicate with others is only as good as the means. Of the means, Emerson, possibly best known for his essay “Self Reliance”, espouses the notion that "respect of the child" creates the best educational outcome. He writes:
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. Respect the child. Wait and see the new product of Nature. Nature loves analogies, but not repetitions.
A natural desire to learn
That all students are inherently interested in seeking truth and knowledge supports the theory that, in a sentiment British educator Charlotte Mason would echo decades later,
children are "born with the natural desire to learn". Such then are the persons that sit in the classroom and are either fed a feast or fed regurgitated mush - either high or low objects. Of the low objects, Emerson writes:
The mind…taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself.
Of accepting and empowering the child's interest in seeking truth as the ultimate respect, Emerson writes:
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.
Recognition of the Naturel
That a liberal education should give students the ability to challenge those in power when necessary is consistent with Emerson's recognition that their nature - the naturel - of children must be kept in tact in order to avoid conformity and false consistency and follow his own instincts and ideas. He states:
The two points of training a child are to keep his naturel 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.
(...)
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
Cooperative Learning
Of his many ideas regarding education, cooperative learning – that human beings should learn to think on their own rather than acquire the imitation of repeating the speech of a teacher - became a bulwark to Emersonian educational theory.
This overarching narrative has its roots in the idea of cooperative learning between teacher and student as the most advantageous for not only the adherence to respecting the child but also the most conducive atmosphere to stoke a person to learn well and live well. Emerson writes:
The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. He plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation. He is the world’s eye. He is the world’s heart.