YOUTH INITIATIVE HIGH SCHOOL
Waldorf Initiative in Viroqua, Wisconsin, USA
COURSES AND CLASSES
Transcendentalism
Grade 12
25 September~ 13 October 2006
Teacher: Mary Bard
Transcendentalism: Finding and Living the Good Life
Transcendentalism, a fancy name ascribed to a radical group of American thinkers, writers, reformers, and poets, flourished for a short time in pre-Civil War New England (1830-1860). Primarily a spiritual, philosophical, and literary movement centered around Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, transcendentalism used the energies and tenets of the American Revolution to transform a restrictive, Puritan tradition into an optimistic and seemingly limitless celebration of the individual and nature.
Men and women from many different countries contributed to this reawakening of the human spirit, but three names—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman—became the mind, body, and soul of this uniquely American movement.
One told Americans that “to believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all” was a mark of genius. Another spent two years in a cabin in the woods and implored the citizens of a young nation to “march to the beat of a different drummer.” The third unabashedly called himself a “kosmos” containing “multitudes.”
How did all three help redefine what it means to be a free, self-reliant American? We will study the roots of transcendentalism, but we will concentrate on these three Americans. We will read various works, but we will study in depth Emerson’s essay “Self Reliance,” Thoreau’s literary masterpiece, Walden, and Whitman’s celebratory poem, Song of Myself.
Still, a pertinent study of transcendentalists would not be complete without also examining the ideas about freedom, conscience, ecology, and character that they passed on to the generations that followed them, including us. What legacy does a philosophy of unbridled optimism in the potential of the human spirit offer a modern age beset by fear, cynicism, materialism, and disasters both natural and manmade? By technological wonders such as I-pods, gene-splicing,, and international markets? In pursuit of an answer to these questions, we will read and discuss selected writings of those who have been inspired by the spirit of the mind , body, and soul of this movement, including John Muir, Rachel Carson, Sigurd Olson, Edward Abbey, Barry Lopez, Aldo Leopold, and Annie Dillard.