In an era when many American parents and educators wonder whether "experiential education" might be better for students than classroom work, my classes still center on reading, writing, talking, and thinking about literature and language. These activities are experiential, too, of course. A thought is an experience. Thinking and reading can be deeply exciting, thoroughly engaging experiences. But my claim goes further. Sustained engagement in the above "indoor" activities is essential because it is through  reading, writing, talking, thinking, and reflecting on thinking that human beings past early childhood develop a sense of self and an interior life.

Thus learning in the humanities is necessary if experiential learning is to be successful -- "minds-on" work is a prerequisite for "hands-on" learning. People who read, write, converse, think, and reflect on their thinking develop internal lives -- that is, selves -- to bring to every endeavor, whether it is participating in a political campaign, climbing a mountain, or cleaning up a river. A person with a self and a continually developing internal life can thoroughly assimilate a "hands-on" experience, making it meaningful and enduringly influential. But a person without such a self can’t fully engage with experiential adventures, whose impact (no matter how exciting initially) will fade on the return home. In short, literacy is absolutely necessary for developing not only students’ minds, hearts, and imaginations, but their participation in civic life, wilderness activities, and environmental preservation.

Subject matter is important, but even more important than the content of what students read, write, hear, think, and reflect on their thinking about is the doing of these things. That is, without continual, intensive  experience in reading, writing, conversing, thinking, and reflecting on thinking, the inner life does not develop.

Barry Sanders, in The Private Death of Public Discourse (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998) explains these matters in eloquent ways. This book and his earlier A Is for Ox are well worth reading because of the truth of his central theme -- which even his most critical reviewers affirm. When Sanders refers to "literacy," he means not just reading and writing but reflecting, so in this passage literacy is assumed to include a developed – even better, a conscious and deliberate – capacity to analyze and reflect, which is fostered in English classes through written and oral discussions of challenging readings and topics, and through helping students improve their thinking:

[The] interior space in which one entertains ideas, nurtures feelings, and concocts arguments affects the boundaries of one’s behavior. The less deeply or fully one occupies that interior space, the emptier and less powerful one feels, the more necessary it becomes to continually project oneself out at the borders, to “come across” … as a force to be heard and recognized. For those devoid of a large and rich inner life … outlandish actions constitute a way of establishing a foothold in a world that feels overwhelmingly complicated. Such people have a difficult time “gaining some distance” or “getting some perspective” on life itself. Literacy changes all that, in the most fundamental way ... (32-3)
    [L]iteracy sponsors and ... authorizes the process of reflective thinking; ... it produces what we term, with deliberate attention, insight: a looking inward to that cleared out, … [articulated] space.... When people turn away from reading and writing, they lose their inner voices and thus the ability to carry out reasoned public discourse.... (34-5)
    [The] most crucial of literate constructions [is] the self ... with whom we carry on our silent conversation, ranging from the most trivial of subjects to the grandest. We talk to ourselves about our state of being and, in those discussions, try to discover – or uncover – how we feel, and to refine those feelings. Out of those conversations, we articulate something called a conscience…. (77-8)