Teaching the Teachers

My neighbor, a high-school teacher, invited me for coffee one morning last spring and conversation naturally turned to the students. Her class, Junior English, was on Thoreau. They had been only mildly interested, it seemed, in Walden Pond; had slept right through Transcendentalism. But when the discussion came around to civil disobedience, eyes snapped open, heads shot up and hands flapped wildly over heads.

“They all began to insist,” she reported, “the our present system was unresponsive to the needs of the people, that it wasn’t working any more, that you had to break laws to get anything accomplished. . . . Well,” and she shrugged her shoulders helplessly, “what could I say?”