Ralph Waldo Emerson's The American Scholar

In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s well-known essay, “The American Scholar,” he addresses that there are three influences on the education of a thinking man: nature, the past and books, and action. This raises the question of “What education route is the most beneficial to young scholars?” Out of Emerson’s three educational views, the most beneficial way of teaching would be by using the past and books.

The “sluggard intellect of this continent,” (paragraph 1) is from the academic teachings built upon gossip and personal views of the educator. The influence of the past and literature not only avoids this by “transmuting life into truth” (paragraphs 12-22), but also shows what is learned today and also what was learned or thought many years ago.

“The human mind can be fed by any knowledge,” (paragraphs 12-22) even the knowledge in books, but you need a “strong head to bear that diet” (paragraphs 12-22). This means that you can derive the knowledge from books, but you must do it right. Yes, there are benefits to the other two educational views that there are not in the educational view of the past and literature. In nature, it would be that nature and the man thinking are alike, in that, they both hold a kind of “circular power” (paragraphs 8-9). The downside to this being that, even though they are “alike,” does not mean the man thinking will learn anything he already knew from nature. While action being with the “scholar subordinate… it is still essential (paragraph ?), this being because an engaging scholar has more existence than a scholar who is second-handedly learning material. Although, this being true, if the engaging scholar be doing the active learning wrong, he is doomed with the wrong information. There is also a downside to my beneficial way of teaching, that being that “books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst…” (paragraph ?) meaning that some scholars take books by word, idolizing them and learning word by word. To fix this, we need to learn the literature and past right, we just need them as inspiration, and not for it as a