Amos Bronson Alcott
(November 29, 1799 – March 4, 1888) was an American
teacher,
writer and philosopher who left a legacy of forward-thinking social
ideas and whose status as a well-publicized figure from the 1830s
to the 1880s stemmed from his founding of two short-lived projects,
an unconventional school and an utopian
community known as "Fruitlands
", as well as from his association with the
philosophy of Transcendentalism
and from the celebrity accruing to his daughter, Little Women author Louisa May Alcott.
Life and work
Early life
A native
New
Englander
, Amos
Bronson Alcott was born in the town of Wolcott
in Connecticut
's New Haven County
The family home was in an area known as Spindle
Hill, and his father, Joseph Chatfield Alcox, a farmer and
mechanic, traced his ancestry to colonial-era settlers in eastern Massachusetts whose surname
had been recorded as "Alcocke". The son adopted the spelling
"Alcott" in his early youth.
Alcott taught himself to read and was self-educated.
Before reaching his
15th birthday in 1814, he was already earning a living by working
in a clock factory in the nearby town of Plymouth
. He left home at 17 and, for a few years,
was a salesman in the American South,peddling books and
merchandise.
Returning to Connecticut in his early
twenties, he was working, by 1823, as a schoolteacher in Bristol
, and subsequently conducted schools in Cheshire
during 1825–27, again in Bristol in 1827–28, then
in Boston
during 1828–30 then, in 1831–33, Germantown, then a
separate community, before its later absorption into Philadelphia
, and in Philadelphia in 1833. As a young
teacher he was most convinced by the
educational philosophy of the
Swiss pedagogue Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi.
In Spring 1830, at the age of 30, he married 29-year-old
Abby May, the sister of reformer and
abolitionist Samuel
J. May. Alcott was himself a
Garrisonian abolitionist, and pioneered
the strategy of
tax resistance to
slavery, which
Henry David Thoreau made famous in
Civil Disobedience.
Alcott publicly debated with Thoreau the use of force and passive
resistance to slavery; along with Thoreau he was among the
financial and moral supporters of
John Brown and occasionally helped
fugitive slaves escape via the
Underground Railroad.
Alcott and Abby May's children:
Educator
In 1834 he opened the "Temple School" in Boston, so called because
it was located in a
Masonic Temple
building. The school was briefly famous, and then infamous, because
of his original methods. Alcott's plan was to develop
self-instruction on the basis of self-analysis, with an emphasis on
conversation and questioning rather than lecturing and drill, which
were prevalent in the U.S. classrooms of the time. Alongside
writing and reading, he gave lessons in "spiritual culture", which
included interpretation of the
Gospels, and
advocated
object teaching in writing instruction. Before
1830, writing (except in higher education) equated to rote drills
in the rules of grammar, spelling, vocabulary, penmanship and
transcription of adult texts. However, in that decade, progressive
reformers such as Alcott, influenced by Pestalozzi as well as
Friedrich Fröbel and
Johann Friedrich Herbart, began to
advocate writing about subjects from students’ personal
experiences. Reformers debated against beginning instruction with
rules and were in favor of helping students learn to write by
expressing the personal meaning of events within their own
lives.
Alcott was fundamentally and philosophically opposed to
corporal punishment as a means of
disciplining his students; instead, he offered his own hand for an
offending student to strike, saying that any failing was the
teacher's responsibility. The shame and guilt this method induced,
he believed, was far superior to the fear instilled by corporal
punishment; when he used physical "correction" he required that the
students be unanimously in support of its application, even
including the student to be punished.
As
assistants in the Temple School, Alcott had two young women who
have subsequently come to be considered among nineteenth-century
America's most talented writers, 30-year-old Elizabeth Palmer Peabody who, in
1835, published A Record of Mr. Alcott's School and
26-year-old Margaret Fuller who was
a teacher during 1836–37; as students he had children of the Boston
intellectual classes, including future writer Josiah Phillips Quincy, grandson of
Harvard
University
president, Josiah
Quincy III. Alcott's methods were not well received;
many readers found his conversations on the Gospels close to
blasphemous, a few brief but frank discussions with the children
regarding birth and circumcision were considered obscene and a
number of his ideas were denigrated as ridiculous. The influential
conservative
Unitarian Andrews Norton, a vocal opponent of
Transcendentalism, derided the book as one-third blasphemy,
one-third obscenity, and the rest nonsense. The school was widely
denounced in the press, with only a few scattered supporters, and
Alcott was rejected by most public opinion. The controversy caused
many parents to remove their children and, as the school closed,
Alcott became increasingly financially desperate. Remaining
steadfast to his pedagogy, a forerunner of
progressive and
democratic schooling, he alienated parents
in a later "parlor school" by admitting an
African American child to the class, whom
he then refused to expel in the face of protests.
Transcendentalism and Fruitlands
Beginning in 1836, Alcott's membership in the
Transcendental Club put him in such
company as
Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Orestes Brownson and
Theodore Parker. A biographer of Emerson
described the group as "the occasional meetings of a changing body
of liberal thinkers, agreeing in nothing but their liberality".
Frederick Henry Hedge wrote of
the group's nature: "There was no club in the strict sense... only
occasional meetings of like-minded men and women".
In 1840
Alcott moved to the Massachusetts
town of Concord
where, writing for the Transcendentalists' journal,
The Dial, during the early 1840s,
he contributed a series of "Orphic Sayings" which were widely mocked
for being dense and meaningless. In the first issue, for
example, he wrote:
On May 8, 1842, Alcott left Concord for a visit to England, where
he met two admirers,
Charles Lane and Henry C.
Wright.
The group's formation of a Transcendental
center in the Massachusetts town of Harvard
was conceived as a utopian
socialist experiment in farm living and
nature meditation, tending to develop the best powers of body and
soul. The commune, named "Fruitlands" (now a
national historic landmark),
failed within seven months and was later described by Alcott's
daughter Louisa May in the title of her published chronicle of the
project,
Transcendental Wild Oats.
In January 1844,
Alcott moved his family to Still River, a village within Harvard
but, by November, the family returned as neighbors of Ralph Waldo Emerson to live in their
Concord home, "Hillside",later renamed "The Wayside
" by Nathaniel
Hawthorne). Four years later, Alcott moved to Boston and,
again, back to Concord after 1857, where he and his family lived in
the Orchard
House
until 1877. While there, Alcott served as
Superintendent to the Concord Public Schools in 1860–61.
He spoke, as opportunity arose, before the "
lyceums" then common in various parts of the United
States, or addressed groups of hearers as they invited him. These
"conversations" as he called them, were more or less informal talks
on a great range of topics, spiritual, aesthetic and practical, in
which he emphasized the ideas of the school of American
Transcendentalists led by Emerson, who was always his supporter and
discreet admirer. He often discussed Platonic philosophy, the
illumination of the mind and soul by direct communion with Spirit;
upon the spiritual and poetic monitions of external nature; and
upon the benefit to man of a serene mood and a simple way of life.
His teachings greatly influenced the growing mid-19th century
New Thought movement.
Final decade
Louisa May attended to his needs in his final years.
As the
seventy-nine-year-old founder of the "Concord School of Philosophy
and Literature", he opened its first session, in 1879, in his own
study in the Orchard
House. In 1880 the school moved to the Hillside
Chapel, a building next to the house, where he held conversations
and, over the course of successive summers, as he entered his
eighties, invited others to give lectures on themes in philosophy,
religion and letters. The school, considered one of the first
formal adult education centers in America, was also attended by
foreign scholars. It continued for nine years, closing in 1888,
following Alcott's death. It was reopened almost 90 years later, in
the 1970s, and has continued functioning with a Summer
Conversational Series in its original building at Orchard House,
now run by the Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association.
Alcott's published books, all from late in his life, include
New Connecticut,
Tablets (1868),
Concord
Days (1872), and
Sonnets and Canzonets (1882). He
left a large collection of journals and memorabilia, most of which
remain unpublished. He died in Boston three months past his 88th
birthday, with Louisa May dying only two days later, as an
aftereffect of mercury poisoning.
Criticism and legacy
Alcott's philosophical teachings have been criticized as
inconsistent, hazy or abrupt. He formulated no system of
philosophy, and shows the influence of
Plato,
German
mysticism, and
Kant as filtered through the writings of
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Like
Emerson, Alcott was always optimistic, idealistic, and
individualistic in thinking. The teachings of
William Ellery Channing a few years
earlier, had also laid the groundwork for the work of most of the
Concord Transcendentalists. Of the contributors to
The
Dial, Alcott was by far the most widely mocked in the press,
chiefly for the high-flown rhetoric of his "Orphic Sayings", but
also, as a separate matter, for his inability to support his family
above poverty level.
Margaret Fuller referred to Alcott as "a philosopher of the balmy
times of
ancient Greece—a man whom
the worldlings of Boston hold in as much horror as the worldlings
of Athens held
Socrates."
From the other perspective, Alcott's unique teaching ideas created
an environment which produced two famous daughters in different
fields, in a time when women were not commonly encouraged to have
independent careers. His ideas also helped to found one of the
first adult education centers in America, and provide the
foundation for future generations of liberal education. Many of
Alcott's educational principles are still used in classrooms today,
including "teach by encouragement," art education, music education,
acting exercises, learning through experience, risk-taking in the
classroom, tolerance in schools, physical education/recess, and
early childhood education.
While many of Alcott's ideas continue to be perceived as being on
the liberal/radical edge, they are still common themes in society,
including vegetarian/veganism, sustainable living, and
temperance/self control. Alcott described his sustenance as a
"Pythagorean diet": meat, eggs, butter, cheese, and milk were
excluded and drinking was confined to well water.
References
Notes
- " Old New Haven", Lapidos, Juliet.
The
Advocate, March 17, 2005
- Hankins, Barry. The Second Great Awakening and the
Transcendentalists. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press,
2004: 129. ISBN 0-313-31848-4
- McFarland, Philip. Hawthorne in Concord. New York:
Grove Press, 2004. p. 79. ISBN 0802117767
- Gross, David (ed.) We Won’t Pay!: A Tax Resistance
Reader ISBN 1434898253 pp. 178-179
- Buell, Lawrence. Emerson. Cambridge, Massachusetts:
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003: 32–33. ISBN
0-674-01139-2
- Gura, Philip F. American Transcendentalism: A History.
New York: Hill and Wang, 2007: 5. ISBN 0-8090-3477-8
- Packer, Barbara L. The Transcendentalists. Athens,
Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 2007: 147–148. ISBN
9780820329581
- Ehrlich, Eugene and Carruth, Gorton. The Oxford Illustrated
Literary Guide to the United States. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1982: 62. ISBN 0195031865
- Nelson, Randy F. (editor). The Almanac of American
Letters. Los Altos, California: William Kaufmann, Inc., 1981:
152. ISBN 086576008X
- Baker, Carlos. Emerson Among the Eccentrics: A Group
Portrait. New York: Viking Press, 1996: 217. ISBN
0-670-86675-X.
Sources
- Alcott, Amos Bronson. Conversations with Children on the
Gospels.
- Brooks, Geraldine.
"Orpheus at the Plough." The New
Yorker, January 10, 2005, pp. 58–65. ( The
New Yorker article is reproduced on author's website)
- Russell, D. R. (2006). Historical studies of composition. In P.
Smagorinsky (Ed), Research on composition: Multiple perspectives on
two decades of change (pp. 243–275). New York, NY: Teachers College
Press.
- Alcott, Amos Bronson. Letters of Amos Bronson
Alcott.
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