Nuts and Flowers, Factories and Gardens, Henry and Me

Nuts and flowers.  Raw materials of sustenance, growth, and beauty.  

And for Henry D. Thoreau, an apt analog for the naturally haphazard thought processes of the unfettered human brain.  

Thoreau wrote in his journal on February 6, 1841 -- long before modern insights into brain science and metacognition:

Nature strews her nuts and flowers broadcast, and never collects them into heaps.  A man does not tell us all he has thought about truth or beauty at a sitting, but, from his last thought on the subject, wanders through a varied scenery of upland, meadow, and woodland to his next.  Sometimes a single and casual thought rises naturally and inevitably with a queenly majesty and escort, like the stars in the east. (16)

No doubt we have all experienced that free flow of thought from one idea to the next, often at our moments of greatest insight and creativity.  I suspect that even the most linear and concrete thinkers among us don’t generally think in heaps or rows.   In their freest form, our thoughts wander, branch off, follow the stars down whatever beautifully logical or illogical path rises before them.

And then comes education. Or schooling.  

Thoreau, whose formal career as a teacher was very short-lived, next wondered:

Shall I transplant the primrose by the river’s brim, to set it beside his sister on the mountain?  This was the soil it grew in, this the hour it bloomed in. If sun, wind, and rain came here to cherish and expand it, shall we not come here to pluck it? Shall we require it to grow in a conservatory for our convenience? (16)

There can be little argument that the typical modern American school is a system of convenience.  To call it a factory system sounds harsh, and even insulting to the very passionate and compassionate people who carry out its workings.  But with “labor” divided into distinct specialties,  and movement through the divisions driven by clocks and bells, we have transplanted Thoreau’s primrose from the riverbed to the conservatory.  Every day we attempt to order nuts and flowers into heaps and patches of the same type and size and order, despite natural inclinations to the contrary.

But even Thoreau recognized the benefit of thoughtful and purposeful cultivation.  He writes in Walden of planting 2.5 acres of beans and some turnips, potatoes, and peas.  His efforts were productive, despite some inhospitable conditions.  In addition to growing some of his own food supply, Thoreau’s harvest earned him nearly $24 for his $15 investment. (Those nine 1845 dollars would be worth about $275 today.)

As the new calendar year has me looking ahead to the second half of the academic year, I am going to keep Thoreau’s garden, and his nuts and flowers, in mind as philosophical guideposts. (As opposed to the factory school model and the sort of mega-single-crop farms that led to the desolation of the Dustbowl and the analogous curricular desolation of testing-age America.)  After 28 years at this, I am still searching for the perfect balance between the natural flow of thought--like Thoreau’s broadcast nuts and flowers--and the profit and produce that grows when we thoughtfully cultivate a garden.  And tomorrow the it continues.