Beauty And Tranquility Of Nature example essay topic

nr y David Thoreau's outlook on education grew problematic because of a growing sense that it prevented learning rather then fostering it. He emphasized a deep respect for the local and concrete as the basis of all learning but education through experience was just as intrinsically valuable as schooling. You can't stop life once when you become a teacher you have to keep learning He spent the rest of his life learning and writing; the two were usually the same for him. The purpose of writing for Thoreau is, if he didn't write, he didn't exist. He would have no purpose in life.

He embodied the notion of continuing education and lifelong learning. Thoreau was an advocate for continuing education more fundamentally in the sense that he knew that no system is sufficient or permanent, that to be responsively alive is to be a perpetual learner, always aware of both the possibilities and the limits of ones current knowledge. Thoreau remained a learner of how he learned, keeping in his journal a series of internal reflections. He believed that body and soul, self and society, emotion and intellect can be reconciled. He asserts a basic succession between the schoolroom and the street by moving the classroom outside, between the process of learning and experience. He believed that the teacher could learn with and from the student.

On the positive side, he wanted to devote all his energies to his writing. But on the negative side, he had a deep, underlying suspicion of the whole activity of formal education. In his journal he writes about how horrible it is to teach when the student isn't experienced or ready for it. Education is never completed, it is always vibrantly alive to the present circumstances of life. While Thoreau sees this cycle as at the heart of the educational process, it is in the area of writing, that he writes with the greatest depth.

He engaged in this learning activity daily, noting: 'How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!' Some progressive educators make the mistake of thinking it is enough to have experiences, just by memory somehow constitute thinking about it Thoreau believed that reading and thinking should not be locked away within the mind only. Henry David Thoreau viewed education as an ongoing process that is necessary to awaken us from abstractions and preconceptions in order to learn and see things in a new light. He emphasized greatly the importance of applying what you learned to actual life, and viewed reading as only introducing you to actual knowledge. This knowledge has to be supplemented with experiences in nature. The newfound knowledge must generate new language through writing; teachers should not only instruct their students but also learn from them. Tranquility in Nature Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson are the two authors that I chose mainly because their ideas about nature are similar.

Thoreau and Emerson were both writers who got their start writing during the nineteenth century. Their views on nature are similar, but as with every writer they show some view of different ideas that make them unique in some special way. In two completely different stories Thoreau and Emerson showed that the woods was the place in nature that they wanted to be in order for them to find themselves. Emerson believed the woods gave the feeling of perpetual youth... In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival I dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years.

In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befal me in life, -no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes, ) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, -my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, -all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball.

I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle from God. The name of the nearest friend sounds foreign and accidental.

To be brothers, to be acquaintances, -master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of un contained and immoral beauty. In the wilderness I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature... (995-996) Emerson believed that something better was in the woods, something that was tranquil, peaceful and beautiful, an area that God could be found. Henry David Thoreau was also a man who loved nature and the woods.

As an author, Thoreau describes his life on Walden pond in Massachusetts which gave him the ability to grasp nature in its picturesque and peaceful environment... I went to the woods because I wished to live desperately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion... (1766) This quotation shows how Thoreau wanted to live and discover himself in the beauty and tranquility of nature. In conclusion, both Emerson and Thoreau believed that the tranquility of nature is needed to complete a person and to make them appreciate life to the fullest.

The. woods. meant everything to the both authors and they spent the best years of their lives appreciating the beauty and tranquility of nature. Both authors believed in God and his impact on them and his beauty in nature. This paper has made me realize that you have to enjoy what is naturally ours and not worry about the problems in our fast paced world.