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On July 4, 1845, Henry David Thoreau went into the woods near Walden Pond, “because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
Let’s take a look at those famous words.
“because I wished to live deliberately”
Thoreau wanted to live with intention and purpose, to make conscious choices about his life rather than following societal conventions or routines without reflection.
“to front only the essential facts of life”
Thoreau wanted to strip away the unnecessary complexities and distractions of modern life to focus on what truly mattered—those elements that define the core of human experience and understanding.
“and see if I could not learn what it had to teach”
He viewed his time in the woods as a learning experience. By immersing himself in nature and simplifying his life, he could gain deeper insights into life and its truths.
“and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived”
Rather than wasting his life on trivial pursuits, he wanted to live authentically and meaningfully, ensuring that his life was rich in experience and understanding.
Thoreau’s retreat to the woods was a conscious decision to examine life’s deeper meanings free from societal pressures. Reducing material possessions and unnecessary activities was his path to clarity and purpose. By immersing himself in the natural world, he aimed to connect with these truths and escape the artificiality of urban life.
His time at Walden Pond was an experiment in living, observing and reflecting. This was as much a journey of self-discovery as internal exploration and it was about understanding the external environment.
One of my favorite writers, William Deresiewicz, the essayist and author of Excellent Sheep, The Death of the Artist, The End of Solitude, and A Jane Austen Education, among other works, is, in his own way, a latter-day Thoreau—a seeker of insights and moments of revelation and transcendence.
He just published an essay that I only wish I had written. Entitled “Deep Reading Will Save Your Soul,” it is the most thoughtful, powerful, and poignant essay on the crisis of the humanities that I have read.
In Deresiewicz’s eyes, the true crisis of the humanities is not the declining size of the humanities professoriate or the flight toward STEM majors. It’s that neither most students nor most faculty members view the heart of a college education as grappling with serious texts, weighty intellectual or ethical issues, and the arts.
The theme of Deresiewicz’s essay might be summed up with these words: “Interesting things are happening in postsecondary education. Just not, for the most part, on college campuses.” Or, put another way: “Real learning has become impossible in universities. DIY programs offer a better way.”
However exaggerated those words might strike you, I think he’s right. Wherever I’ve taught or studied, whether at small liberal arts colleges, Ivy plusses, or broad access institutions, surprisingly few people consider college an opportunity to engage with complex ideas, develop their own perspectives on fundamental questions about human existence, morality and society, and appreciate diverse cultures, histories and forms of artistic expression alongside others who share those interests.
The problem, Deresiewicz claims, is two-fold. First, he writes, “academic humanities departments have become inimical to humanistic inquiry as opposed to political tub-thumping.” Expressed with greater nuance, there has a been a shift, within the humanities, away from the exploration of universal human experiences and values and appreciation of literature, the arts, philosophy and history.
His second concern is that too many undergraduates, even at the most selective colleges, resist reading, and even worse struggle to read closely and critically. As one Harvard English professor noted: “The last time I taught The Scarlet Letter, I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb.” Adds Deresiewicz: “And this is at Harvard.”
We mustn’t beat around the bush: As Beth McMurtrie has written, “Students are coming to college less able and less willing to read.” The problem isn’t simply a lack of reading endurance or weak vocabularies among less well-prepared undergraduates, but difficulty analyzing complex and lengthy texts among many top students. In response, a colleague in one of Harvard’s humanities departments has reduced weekly reading assignments from 250–300 pages a week to 100–150.
Nor did this problem emerge overnight. ;McMurtrie cites a 2000 study that found that whereas 80 percent of students normally did their reading in 1981, the figure had fallen to 20 percent in 1997. The National Assessment of Educational Progress reports that only 17 percent of 13-year-olds read for fun every day, down from 35 percent in 1984. A study by the American Psychological Association found that the percentage of 12th graders who read a book or magazine every day fell from 60 percent in the late 1970s to 16 percent in 2016.
In his recent book Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror, the media scholar Andrey Mir, drawing upon the theorists Walter Ong and Robert Logan and the philosopher Karl Jaspers, argues that digital technology has had the effect of undercutting prolonged immersive reading that requires sustained attention.
Is it even imaginable that most existing campuses could place reading center stage and make serious intellectual discourse central to the undergraduate experience? Deresiewicz scoffs, and with a few obvious exceptions—the Columbia and Chicago core curricula, St. John’s in Annapolis, Purdue’s Cornerstone certificate program, and various honors colleges—he’s almost certainly right.
As he puts this:
“Colleges and universities do not seem inclined to reform themselves, and if they were, they wouldn’t know how, and if they did, they couldn’t. Between bureaucratic inertia, faculty resistance, and the conflicting agendas of a heterogenous array of stakeholders, concerted change appears to be impossible.”
If we seek serious intellectual engagement, we mustn’t look in the groves of academe, but elsewhere, at the adult learning initiatives that have sprung up off-campus. Deresiewicz cites a number of striking examples, like the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research (founded in 2012 by graduate students who I knew well at Columbia); the Catherine Project started by Zena Hitz, who teaches in St. John’s great books program; the Zephyr Institute, which has offered humanities-based programs in Silicon Valley since 2014; and the Matthew Strother Center for the Examined Life, in which Deresiewicz himself teaches.
I’m sure you can come up with other examples, like the CUNY Graduate Center’s LP2 Lifelong Peer Learning Program, or the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History’s self-paced classes that target social studies and history teachers nationwide. Then, there are the countless reading groups scattered across the country.
Perhaps that’s the best we can do. Maybe that’s enough. But let’s be honest. Most of these programs are for well-educated professionals, often retirees, and their cost is an impediment to broader participation. Many other pro bono initiatives are extremely small.
Creating a society where ideas and the arts matter requires a broader approach that extends beyond the confines of the academy. While universities play a crucial role in intellectual and cultural development, they primarily serve a younger demographic and have increasingly prioritized STEM and vocational fields. We need to turn our attention elsewhere.
To foster a culture where ideas and the arts are valued throughout one's life, it is essential to engage a wider audience through lifelong learning programs and cultural institutions such as art, history, natural history, and science museums, as well as historical societies and archives. These institutions need to transform themselves into dynamic cultural hubs and forums, promoting continuous engagement with ideas and the arts.
Let’s do more to bring the intellectual life out of the academy’s walled garden. We need to democratize intellectual inquiry and make serious ideas accessible to all.
That was, of course, the animating vision behind MOOCs (massive open online courses), before they became what they are today: an online delivery mechanism for professional master’s degree and certificate programs. I know: The original idea was flawed. A culture of ideas requires the kinds of interpersonal interaction that MOOCs proved unable to offer.
Before MOOCs, that democratic vision inspired public television, before it abandoned its adult education roots and limited its ambitions to Ken Burns-like documentaries interspersed with various pop concerts and antiques road shows. And anyway, television is a unidirectional and privatized medium, a one-way form of communication consumed in private settings, without interactivity and communal engagement,
Let’s make intellectual engagement a public affair. Ideas are for everyone.
