"Self-Reliance Vs. Self-Esteem"

Ralph Waldo Emerson was "America’s first great public intellectual," writes Michael Knox Beran (in City Journal, an odd place to read about the "Sage of Concord, perhaps, but we take what we can get). "He breathed new life into methods of educating young people that have their origin in the earliest epochs of our national history and that, until not all that long ago, occupied a central place in the American classroom. More important, his vision of the goal of education—the nurturing of independent and sturdily self-reliant individuals—is a particularly American, and a particularly valuable, ideal." This is one of those articles I hate to try to summarize, but Beran has a lot of interesting points about the nature and purpose of education and the role poetry can play in it.

If I hadn't already selected a book that I'm reading a passage from every day of 2004, I would probably be reading A Year With Emerson, published by David R. Godine, which offers 365 excerpts of prose and verse. But that just means that I have one more reason to look forward to 2005, right?