Art is not important. I'll tell you what. IBM, Microsoft, and any other business or company that will help make young, malleable minds technologically savvy in order for them to achieve enough wealth to consume appropriately. Thoreau has no business in this environment. I believe that there can be no greater mismatch than to teach Walden in any institution whose primary objective is to safeguard the tenets of careerism and consumerism.
Teachers are no more, or less, human than anyone else.
This is true. Make that friends, not fiends. I want some of your opinions on why Thoreau is left out of so many literature classes in both high school and college. It seems to me that all that today's so called English teachers care about is if you can fill out a Job resume properly. This is disgraceful.