A b e c e d a r i a n

These guys (Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne, etc.) lived amongst the splendor of the Berkshires in the fall. They knew intimately what beauty smelled like as well as its place in the education and cultivation of character. "The American Scholar," Emerson's address to the Harvard graduating class of 1837, and his work "On Education" should be read alongside Dennison's The Lives of Children or Goodman's Growing Up Absurd because as social critiques they represent a kind of prophecy and "wide awakeness" that all good teaching and scholarship should abide in.