Education
The theme of education appears often in Stuart's books. He described the role that teaching played in his life in The Thread that Runs So True (1949), though he changed the names of places and people. He first taught school in rural Kentucky at the age of 16 at Cane Creek Elementary School, which became Lonesome Valley in his book.
After being denied at three colleges, he was finally accepted at and attended Lincoln Memorial University, near Harrogate, Tennessee. After graduating he returned to the area and taught at Warnock High School in Greenup, Kentucky. Later he was appointed principal at McKell High School, but resigned a year later to attend graduate school at Vanderbilt University. He also served as superintendent of the Greenup County Schools before ending his career as an English teacher at Portsmouth (Ohio) High School.
The Thread that Runs So True (1949) has become a classic of American education. Ruel Foster noted in 1968 that the book had good sales in its first year. At the time she wrote, sales for the book had gone up in each successive year, an astonishing feat for any book. The book has remained continuously in print for more than fifty years.
Read more about this topic: Jesse Stuart
Famous quotes containing the word education:
“Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)
“How to attain sufficient clarity of thought to meet the terrifying issues now facing us, before it is too late, is ... important. Of one thing I feel reasonably sure: we can’t stop to discuss whether the table has or hasn’t legs when the house is burning down over our heads. Nor do the classics per se seem to furnish the kind of education which fits people to cope with a fast-changing civilization.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“I prefer to finish my education at a different school.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)