Walden On Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2013

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Introduction 1-Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

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Background

Cultural Context: The Student Debt Crisis

Higher education in the US has increasingly become too expensive for most students to afford. In part, this change began in the 1960s, when future president Ronald Reagan led a campaign against higher education in California, believing it was a breeding ground for liberal ideas, which is precisely what Ken Ilgunas expected from his Duke University experience. Reagan’s plan involved cutting funding to higher education, arguing that the increased cost of tuition would be paid in the form of student loans, assuming that students would pay back these loans with the salaries they earned in jobs that made use of a degree. Beginning in the late 1960s, as these policies took hold across the country, students began taking out millions of dollars in loans to pay for their educations. In the 1980s, these loans had expanded into the billions, but the economy of the 1980s allowed most students to get sufficient salaries after graduation to pay back their loans.

Through the 1990s and into the present, student costs and consequent debt have increased astronomically, leading to the situation that Ilgunas describes in Walden on Wheels, in which most students graduate facing insurmountable debt and little to no hope of securing a job capable of paying it off. Part of the issue with the student debt crisis is the balance of perspectives, in which many view education as a commodity that students choose to acquire, while others see education as a necessary step toward overall success in their careers. The result is that, as Ilgunas notes, high school students are pressured into taking out large loans for degrees that do not pay for themselves, and millions of Americans are saddled with debts they have little hope of paying back.

Literary Context: Henry David Thoreau, Walden, and Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism is a movement in thought and literature that began in the early 19th century, specifically in New England, the cluster of small states in the Northeastern United States. The basis of transcendentalist thought is that society—especially industrialism and modernity—has corrupted the inherent goodness of human nature. Independence from society and closeness with nature are divine and pure to transcendentalists, encompassing the true beauty and enjoyment of humanity. Transcendentalism is one of the first uniquely American branches of philosophy, and it became a definitive ideology through the Transcendental Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are two of the most notable transcendentalist writers from this club.

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was a naturalist, abolitionist, and prolific writer, who promoted transcendentalism as civil disobedience and resistance to the influence of the state on individual lives. Thoreau studied at Harvard and lived in Concord, Massachusetts when he wrote his famous essay “Civil Disobedience” and his work Walden. Walden chronicles Thoreau’s social experiment in independence and transcendental philosophy, living for just over two years in a cabin by Walden Pond and exploring his relationship to nature, society, and himself. Ilgunas refers to Walden in his own work, comparing his experience of living in a van to Thoreau’s living in a small cabin. At the end of Walden on Wheels, Ilgunas mentions many of his criticisms of Thoreau’s experiment, such as Thoreau’s ready access to the town of Concord and the fact that Thoreau’s mother did his laundry in town, defeating the purpose of the isolation component of Thoreau’s writing.