In his great poem from 1798, Frost at Midnight, Samuel Taylor Coleridge looks back on his own schooldays in London where, he says, he saw nothing beautiful but the sky and stars. He thinks of his infant son, sleeping beside him, and looks forward to the time when the child will learn from wandering freely in the natural world. Here he will be taught by Nature or God in Nature, whom the poet calls the Great Universal Teacher.
Coleridge has a vision of learning as a pleasant and unforced part of growing up - the opposite of the industrial model that could be found in his own time, and again in ours. In choosing this as a domain name for a teaching Web site, I have sought to acknowledge that Coleridge is right and the control freaks and bullies are wrong. That may seem odd in a site where so much of the material seems to support the official state drudgery. But it is my hope that students who use the resources here can thereby save, or wrest back, some of the time the state wants to take from them. Catch your dreams before they slip away.
Click here to read the full text of Frost at Midnight.