Beginning of Essay
“Which would have advanced the most at the end of the month, -the boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this-or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute ....

Middle of Essay
.... to do the same work and merely given a jackknife. The boy who has done his own work has achieved the knowledge through experience; he has learned more because he has had to teach himself what to do. The other boy is merely a parrot mimicking the strategy of someone else, he hasn’t had to apply his own thoughts to the work, and he has only had to copy someone else’s work. Thoreau emphasizes his point on learning through experience and nature throughout his book. “But while we are confined to books…we are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak…”(p 79). Here he says if we limit our source of knowledge to ....