Context
Bronson Alcott was arguably the first American educator to create radical schools that embrace the principles of active learning—students creating and articulating knowledge for themselves, using their writing about texts as a cognitive activity, and listening to each other in ways that anticipate Reader Response criticism. Several of these schools were in rural Connecticut, where Alcott was born and culminated in the famous Temple School, named after the building adjacent to the Boston common where it was housed. That he is still not given the attention he deserves is the result of two of his own shortcomings: first, he couldn’t write his way out of a paper bag, and second, he was fiscally irresponsible as a teacher and a family man. Of course, it is as a family man that he has come down in literary history as the father of the Little Women. As to the first,deficiency, he tried writing about the unfolding of an infant’s mind based on the observations of his first two daughters in a manuscript titled Psyche. While he began with a promising basis in specifics, it quickly launched itself into the Transcendental stratosphere of Transcendental mysticism and fuzzy abstractions. Emerson tried to help him revise the book through several drafts, and each draft got worse; Emerson gave up trying to turn Alcott into a writer.
This posting is longer than the usual ones, which I’ve tried increasingly to shorten, but to best study Alcott’s methods and skills as a student-centered teacher, we need to closely read the transcripts that Elizabeth Peabody and Margaret Fuller, both soon to become pioneering teachers in their own rights, made as his assistants. They reveal listening skills and an openness to taking seriously children’s ideas that can enrich our own teaching.
Unlike figures like Emerson and Horace Mann who also began careers as teachers, Bronson Alcott had only a few years of education in a country school, belonged to no particular denomination, and developed his educational philosophy only gradually and unsystematically. By the time his reputation grew strong enough to have the leading families of Boston send their children to his Temple School, his attitudes and methods would become so controversial that the enterprise soon collapsed, and Alcott was never to have his own classroom again. Alcott’s lessons for us, then, are both positive and negative; he was the first person in the tradition of the active learning to create a school that fully its enacted its principles, but he was oblivious enough of social realities beyond the classroom to either sustain this school or spread its ideas further. His long life span from 1799 to 1888 makes him a valuable lens through which to witness some important vicissitudes of active learning in America.
Amos Bronson Alcott was born on a bleak, windy farm in Wolcott, Connecticut. His best friend in childhood was his cousin and neighbor, William Andrus Alcott, with whom he attended a school typical of American rural education. As Bronson Alcott describes it: “The schoolhouse stood near the centre of the district at the junction of four roads. The spot was peculiarly exposed to the bleak winds of winter; nor were there any shade trees near, to shelter the children from the scorching rays of the summer’s sun during their recreations.” Around three sides of the single, small room were desks for the older children facing the teacher’s desk on the fourth side, on which rested a rod and a ferule. In front of the teacher’s desk were the benches for the youngest students. The little ones, being closest to the large fireplace, were the most likely to get cooked and smoked by the burning of this soggy wood and the older students seated in back were usually chilled; the two temperatures available were too hot and too cold.
The physical discomfort, however, shrank in comparison to the impoverishment of the mental environment. The primary instructional method just as at Harvard was the recitation, where it was the student’s task to commit to memory and then stand and deliver in front of the teacher, who corrected such performances. In the piece already quoted, Alcott describes the teaching of spelling, which emphasizes the learning of isolated words instead of seeing them in context: “To teach spelling, a lesson was assigned, consisting of a certain number of columns of words arranged in alphabetical order. . . . No faculty was called into exercise but the memory.” In reading there was no better correlation of marks and meanings, as “the instructor . . . made the corrections. These extended no farther than the right pronunciation of the words.”
In reaction to these methods, when Alcott began teaching in 1823 in the country schools near Wolcott, he declared that the teacher’s task was “to invite rather than to compel attention; to awaken thought rather than to load the memory; and in one word to develop the whole mind and heart, rather than a few of the properties of either.” The first thing he did was redesign the classroom, creating desks with backs and insuring that each student would have private writing space. This would seem a small enough innovation, yet it took someone with Alcott’s vision to confront the obvious. His biographer, John Messerli, writes: “The Yankee ingenuity which had designed the Windsor and Hitchcock chairs was satisfied to let children bend their spines as they sat for hours like so many birds perched on a backless pine bench.” Alcott arranged these desks in a semicircle around the walls, leaving an open central space for games and other activities. He decorated his classrooms with pictures, engravings, and cypress branches and encouraged his students to bring in flowers and other ornaments for their desks. In his teaching Alcott reversed the customary order, often moving from the concrete to the abstract. He began the study of geography by having the students make maps of the schoolyard and taught arithmetic through physical objects: blocks, cubes, and beans—what we would now call math manipulatives. In reading he carefully taught his students the sounds of the letters but also used pictures to have them identify whole words, anticipating the word recognition method. His spelling words were taken from the students’ reading, not from lists. Instead of repeating sentences from a copy-book, the students wrote and shared their own thoughts in journals.
During this period of teaching five years in four different Connecticut schools Alcott did not read widely in philosophy. His main influence was the Swiss educator Johann Pestalozzi, whose ideas Alcott absorbed second-hand through reading the American Journal of Education, founded in 1826 by William Russell, later to become a friend and collaborator. Pestalozzi believed that human nature was basically good and could be perfected through education; his epistemology was Lockean, having students begin with observing and discussing physical objects in the classroom. As Alcott’s thought and practice developed he went beyond the limitations of this system to place more emphasis on cultivating active thinking. In a letter of 1827 he stresses “the production and original exercise of thought. I found that whatever children do themselves is theirs; and besides the advancement of the intellectual progress, tends to produce strength, and ability to encounter more severe trials.” From the start of his teaching Alcott had an intuitive sense that thinking can best be fostered not by external impositions but by observing and following the child’s own tendencies: “The province of the instructor should be simple, awakening, invigorating, directing, rather than the forcing of the child’s faculties upon prescribed and exclusive courses of thought. He should look to the child to see what is to be done, rather than to his book or system. The Child is the Book. The operations of his mind are the true system.” As Alcott’s schools became more widely known, partly through articles written by his cousin William and himself in the American Journal of Education, they attracted the attention of a young Unitarian minister in Brooklyn, Connecticut, Samuel May, who was convening a school reform convention in Hartford. Alcott was invited to May’s house, where, in the minister’s absence, he was hosted by his sister, Abby, whom Alcott later married. May helped arrange for Alcott to start in 1828 a charity infant school in Boston, then the hub of reform movements.
Alcott’s experiences in Boston led to his first book, Observations on the Principles and Methods of Infant Instruction. The immediate occasion of its writing was a contest for $100 offered by the Pennsylvania School District for the best essay on running a school for children under five. After noting that “ the child is essentially an active being,” Alcott maintains “The claims of animal nature in infancy are primary and paramount to all others; and it is not till these are anticipated and relieved by unrestrained movement, that the intellect can be successfully addressed.” Play and exercise are not simply a preliminary to intellectual instruction but create a context to which intellectual instruction leads back: “Instruction, unless connected with active duty, and expressed in character, can be at best but a doubtful good.” Further, instruction should never be solely intellectual but connected with emotions, with the immediate contexts of a child’s life: “Mechanical recitations, wordy lessons, dissociated from the intellect, are to be wholly avoided.” Foreshadowing his chief method in the Temple School, he says: “Affectionate and familiar conversation is the chief avenue to the infant mind. . . . This is the powerful spring which puts the young heart in action.” While Alcott felt that education should be moral, he knew that this aspect could not take the form of abstract precepts separated from concrete situations. The book ends with a summary that can serve as an epitome for future child-centered education:
Infant education when adapted to the human being, is founded on the great principle, that every infant is already in possession of the faculties and apparatus required for his instruction, and that, by a law of his constitution, he uses these to a great extent himself; that the office of instruction is chiefly to facilitate this process, and to accompany the child in his progress, rather than to drive or even to lead him.
Alcott’s entry did not win first prize but attracted the notice of Robert Vaughn in Philadelphia, who invited him and William Russell to set up a school in Germantown. This school and similar attempts in Philadelphia itself never attracted a wide enrollment, and Alcott used the ensuing leisure to study the infant development of his first two daughters, Anna and Louisa, and to begin reading widely and deeply in philosophy. He reread Locke and moved on to Plato, Aristotle, and Bacon. Then in September 1832 he read Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection in James Marsh’s edition. Alcott said this book “formed a new era in my mental and psychological life,” read it five times within the first four years of his discovery, and for the next fifty years kept it on his list of annual reading. Specifically, Alcott looked at Coleridge and Marsh as providing a more supple and complex basis for education: “I was looking around for the origin of the human powers. . . . It was Coleridge that lifted me out of this difficulty.” Reading Aids did not cause Alcott to jettison Locke but to see his epistemology as only one faculty of the mind, the Understanding, while the higher and more encompassing function of Reason allowed the mind to apprehend the spirit in the same way that the senses did for matter. Further, Reason, reflecting on all the workings of the mind could create a growing, unified, active self. Still unable to attract students in Philadelphia, Alcott returned to Boston. There he met Elizabeth Peabody, herself a teacher and unpaid secretary to William Ellery Channing, the founder of American Unitarianism. Peabody was so impressed with Alcott’s teaching that she helped organize the Temple School, which opened in September 1834. With the backing of the influential Channing, she was able to recruit thirty children between the ages of three and twelve from some of the city’s most elite families. Further, she served as Alcott’s assistant, teaching areas in which Alcott was weak, such as Latin and arithmetic.
We are fortunate to have a detailed picture of this school from a book published under her name, Record of a School, exemplifying the General Principles of Spiritual Culture. Peabody also transcribed discussions on Christ’s life, published in two volumes in 1836 and 1837 under Alcott’s name, Conversations with Children on the Gospels, Unfolding the Doctrine and Discipline of Human Culture. As the full titles of each suggest, the books attempt to discover general propositions about education and the nature of the child through the close examination of particular students in a particular school. These books are the first extensive descriptions of an American school for two reasons. First, Alcott and Peabody were probably the first teachers to acknowledge that children might have anything valuable to say on their own, that their utterances were worth listening to in the classroom and then setting down in writing. Second, since the principles and methods of the school were based on interactive processes with the students, there was no way to convey a sense of these principles and methods through the more usual channels of abstract philosophical exposition, curriculum guides, or textbooks. These books tell the story of a single classroom as a way of getting to the heart of educational issues and as such are the first in a genre of American writing which did not fully blossom until the 1960s and 70s.
While both books attempt to relate the general to the particular throughout, they also each begin with statements of principles; Peabody writes an extensive “Explanatory Preface” to the second edition of Record, and Alcott prefaces Conversations with an essay “The Doctrine and Discipline of Human Culture.” In these statements Peabody and Alcott expound a thoroughly Transcendentalist and idealist view of education. They see conventional education as facing in the wrong direction by turning outward to the natural world, which can only reflect the spirit less directly than the child’s own mind. This emphasis on external fact, Peabody suggests, runs counter to the students’ own inclinations and aptitudes:
There has been proof enough, that this common plan is a bad one, in the universally acknowledged difficulty of making children study those things to which they are first put. . . —also in the absolute determination, with which so many fine minds turn aside from word-knowledge and dry science, to play and fun, and to whatever interests the imagination or heart;—finally, in the very small amount of acquisition. . . . In most cases, the attention has been bewildered, discouraged, or dissipated by a variety of objects; and in the best cases, the mind has become onesided and narrow.
In contrast to this proliferation of external facts through separate subjects and textbooks, Peabody and Alcott propose a more wholistic education based on the children examining and articulating their own consciousness, engaging in a juvenile version of the act of spiritual reflection as proposed by Coleridge and Marsh. The external world is indeed used, but primarily as “imagery, to express the inward life,” and tendencies towards egotism and self-absorption can be checked by contemplating one’s spirit as the particularization of an infinite God.
The most obvious objection here is that the Temple School is founded upon a particular metaphysic that has few adherents now and that this vision becomes the hidden agenda of the school. It is an objection not easily disposed of but it had been anticipated by the teachers. Peabody notes that the very methods Alcott adopts—his beginning with students’ own perceptions, through journals and Socratic discussions— work against any kind of indoctrination: Alcott “is so successful in arousing the activity of the children’s own minds, and he gives such free scope to their associations, that his personal peculiarities are likely to have much less influence than those of most instructors.” She points out that there can be less objection to Alcott’s working with student definitions of vocabulary words than to Johnson’s dictionary, for in the former’s approach “the manner in which the words are studied and talked about in school is such that the children must be perpetually reminded, that nothing connected with spiritual subjects can be finally settled into any irreversible formula of doctrine,” a fluidity that extends to the entire biblical text:
Having read the lesson for the day, he asks for their own associations with words, their impressions of events, the action of their Imagination, and the conclusions of their Reason upon them. All sides of every subject are presented by the various children. . . . He does not wish the children to think, that the meaning of Scripture is a matter of authority; and this is the chief reason why he does not decide in favor of particular views, dogmatically.
The conception of spirit at the Temple School was not as a fixed entity but metamorphic, always in process, so that it created a kind of transitoriness and incompletion to any single verbal formulation.
This appreciation of the constructed and provisional nature of any verbal creation lies behind some of the best teaching moments. For example, in their conversations throughout the first year, the class had formulated a table of certain human attributes such as “aspiration,” and “imagination,”—abstractions that the students then went on to explore and define in terms of their own experiences. On the last day of class, Peabody records the following:
Mr. Alcott then recurred to the blackboard, and said he would read the scale. This diagram had been altered many times during the quarter. It was intended merely to systematize the conversations in a degree; and never was presented to the children as a complete map of the mind. Some have objected to these diagrams, as if they would be fetters on the minds of the children. But their constant renewal and changes preclude the possibility of their being regarded as any thing but what they are. After having read the scale through, he began at the end asking the meaning of each word, and as they were defined, he obliterated them, until all were gone.
The diagram here is not offered as a detached and self-contained truth, but as a tool to help the students probe, order, and articulate their own experience. As Peabody points out, the scheme is treated as mediate in the light of that experience, subject to reconsideration and revision. In a final flourish, Alcott even erases the scheme after each term is used to emphasize that the verbal construct should be not be abstracted from the lesson, taken away as product, but rather that the entire process is crucial.
This emphasis on process, on the making of knowledge, also helps explain the centrality of the discussion method. For Alcott, Jesus was a great teacher not because of what he said but for how he engaged his listeners: “Instead of seeking formal and austere means, he rested his influence chiefly on the living word, rising spontaneously in the soul. . . . Speech comes unbidden. Nature lends her images. Imagination sends abroad her winged words. We see thought as it springs from the soul, and in the very process of growth and utterance.” At about this time Alcott noted in his journal: “Education is not merely the diffusion of knowledge already attained; but it is that agency which so unfolds the soul, and whets its powers, as to put new provinces of nature and spirit within its reach; and is full of prophecies of discovery.” Indeed, one of Alcott’s crucial achievements is that he grasped in an immediate, operative way the liberating potential of classroom conversation:
Certainly the best we can do is to teach ourselves and children how to talk. Let conversation displace much that passes current under the name of recitation; mostly sound and parrotry, a repeating by rote not by heart unmeaning sounds from the memory and no more. Good teaching makes the child an eye-witness, he seeing, then telling what is seen, what is known, or comprehended; a dissolving of the text for the moment and a beholding in thought as through a glass. . . So taught the masters: Plato, Plutarch, Pythagoras, Pestalozzi: so Christianity was first published from lovely lips; so every one teaches deserving the name of teacher or interpreter. Illustration always and apt; life calling forth life; the giving of life and a partaking.
With all this in mind we should listen to some passages from the transcripts to see how the process worked. Alcott initiates the conversations on Gospel passages thus:
The best thoughts do not lie on the surface of our minds. We have to dive under for them, like pearl fishers. This morning I am going to ask some questions, that I may prove to you, by your own answers to them, that you are capable of thinking on this subject; and of having thoughts come from your minds, which will interest all,—teaching yourselves to know yourselves, and teaching me
.
Alcott warns the students that they will learn the most by going as fully as they can into their own minds, searching for both emotional depth and strenuous thinking, as suggested by the pearl diving metaphor. Further, their thinking has to be their own in an intellectually self-reliant way, not just a replication of what either teacher or students have learned in the past: “I do not know all I am going to say, for I shall have new thoughts, that I never had before. Still less do you know all you are going to say. . . . But if we all think, and all say what we think, not repeating the words and thoughts of others, we shall teach each other.”
In the second conversation in the series, Alcott suggests that a close consideration of both nature and scripture proves the existence of spirit, but as usual the doctrinal point recedes and the play of mind over the ideas becomes crucial in itself:
Mr. Alcott. Do smaller things prove greater things, or greater things smaller things? How many do not understand me? (Several held up their hands.)
Does an acorn prove there has been an oak, or an oak prove there has been an acorn? (Some said one and some the other, as they did also to the next question.)
Mr. Alcott. Which was first in time, an acorn or an oak?
George K. Sometimes one is first and sometimes the other. In the woods, oaks grow up wild; and you can plant acorns and have oaks.
Samuel R. I think God made oaks first, and all the other oaks there have ever been, came from the acorns of those first oaks.
Mr. Alcott. Does light prove darkness, or darkness light?
Several. Each proves the other. . . .
( He then asked questions about many things, among the rest a brook and the ocean, the cradle and the grave, and similar answers were returned. He remarked that their answers showed which minds were historical and which were analytic.)
Alcott’s first question here is probably unanswerable, and in any case he does not seem to have a particular answer of his own that he wants the children to adopt. Instead of trying to adjudicate among students as to which is the best answer, he makes what we would now call a metacognitive, reflective move, suggesting that how we answer might depend on how we approach thinking itself, not on which way is objectively “true.” Without trying to have this somewhat playful discussion bear too much weight, we might say that Alcott here initiates the students in post-Kantian thinking—if we cannot produce ontological statements that are certain, we can at least set our minds to a task and then observe and reflect upon its workings.
In a later conversation after reading a passage from Luke about John the Baptist in the desert, Alcott begins the discussion by asking “Now what came into your minds while I was reading?”
Josiah. The deserts seemed to me a great space covered with sand, like that in the hour-glass. The sun was shining on it, and making it sparkle. There were no trees. John was there alone.
Edward J. I thought the deserts meant woods, with paths here and there.
Lucy. I thought of a space covered with grass and some wild flowers, and John walking about.
Charles. I thought of a prairie.
Alexander. I thought of a few trees scattered over the country, with bees in the trunks.
George K. I thought of a place without houses, excepting John’s; and flowers, trees, and bee-hives.
This interaction is more affective and imaginative than the previous passage, engaging the students in what we might now call creative visualization. The first thing to notice here and throughout all of the conversations is the long run of uninterrupted student responses without any intervening teacher remarks to praise, blame, or correct. Alcott declines the customary teacher role of central switchboard—verbally acknowledging each student comment before sending it back out to the class. By contrast, Alcott allows here a rich display of divergent thinking, that yet has its convergent aspect, as when the responses build on each other where George K. brings together in his comment previous images of flowers, trees, and bees.
One way to consider discussions like this is as early experiments in reader response criticism. We can see before us how the children, given a biblical narrative very sparse in details, fill in the picture with their own visualizations and concrete details. This is not so much simply adding to the text but an intrinsic part of reading and it is this very process of active construction that makes it such a pleasure. Our memories and imaginations supply vitality and plenitude. Of course, the individual reader feels that he or she is simply reading the text, and it takes an experience such as Alcott’s classroom to see that one’s own interpretation is just that, one way of apprehending it. Here is another example from the same conversation:
Andrew. I thought, one night, as Elisabeth was sleeping, an angel brought her a child, and made her dream she had one, and she awoke and it was lying at her side.
William B. I think he was born like other children except that Elisabeth had visions.
George K. I thought God sent an angel to give her a child. It cried as soon as it came and waked up its mother to give it something to eat.
Lucia. When John was first born, his mother did not know it, for he was born in the night; but she found it by her side in the morning.
The text Alcott had read to them at the beginning of the session simply says: “Now Elisabeth’s full time came that she should be delivered: and she brought forth a son.” The children themselves fill the narrative gaps left by this bare laconic account similar to the ways they fill in the gaps of their own lack of knowledge about childbirth.
Alexander. Birth is like the rain. It comes from heaven.
Lucia. I think it is like a small stream coming from a great sea; and it runs back every night, and so becomes larger and larger every day, till at last it is large enough to send out other streams.
Lemuel. Lives streamed from the ocean first; now smaller streams from the larger ones, and so on.
Samuel R. Birth is like the rising light of the sun; the setting is death.
Again we see the students responding divergently but also building on each other, as when Lucia takes the image of rain, expands it to streams and seas, which in turn Lemuel elaborates, all in ways that resemble the use of analogies to stimulate creative thinking. One of Alcott’s main goals here is to help the students establish their own personal, imaginative relations to reading that are the opposite of the de-contextualized and mechanical methods through which he was taught. The connections his own students make will help make their reading a more voluntary activity as well as a more actively cognitive one.
All this should be kept in mind as we confront the most frequent criticism of Alcott’s teaching that we have already noted, that he manipulates the students. Some of this is surely going on at both the conscious and unconscious levels. Just as Freudian patients tend to come up with Freudian dreams, Jungian patients with Jungian dreams, so Alcott’s students often seem particularly idealistic and Wordsworthian. While Alcott’s vision helped set the parameters of discussion and dictated his own line of questioning, it became as he taught more a framework just like the diagram he first uses and then erases.
As Frederick Dahlstrand puts it:
Alcott’s paradigm gave the children a means of exercising their minds. It served as a structure on which they could build ideas. In one sense the paradigm limited them, but in another important way it freed them—it freed them from the tyranny of disorganization. It time they could cast away the paradigm, but the thought processes it helped them develop could stay with them forever. Alcott may not have made his students more spiritual, nor awakened in them the truth of spiritual things, but he did make them think. Almost despite himself, his methods succeeded.
Barbara Packer takes a similar view of the effect, suggesting that Alcott’s success in getting his students to think and imagine was his primary aim:
As a way of collecting a new set of Christian evidences, Alcott’s pedagogy would seem to fail miserably, because the children can never be persuaded to adopt his beliefs and indeed argue back to him more and more. . . . Yet Alcott seems as pleased with their resistance as their concurrence. On the first page of the book itself is an illustration showing Alcott’s classroom—Alcott at a desk, and the children ranged rather stiffly around in a semicircle at some distance from him. At the end of both volumes is another illustration, this time of the boy Jesus teaching the elders in the Temple. Between these two emblems occurs the education in self-reliance that finally comes to seem the real message of the book and gives it its power and its innocence.
Indeed, Alcott himself in his introduction to Conversations says: “it is a work, intended rather to awaken thought; enkindle feeling; and quicken to duty; than to settle opinions, or promulgate sentiments of any kind.” And he wrote in the Dial for January 1841: “The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence. He inspires self-trust. He guides their eyes from himself to the spirit that quickens him.” In these statements, as in the teaching itself, he emphasizes education as a dialectical activity where the energy of the process is always more crucial than any single end-point.
As if true to its appreciation of flux and the fleeting usefulness of any cultural creation, the Temple School did not last long. Its downfall was initiated paradoxically by the very attempt of Alcott and Peabody to preserve in these books the work of the school and bring it to wider notice. Elizabeth Peabody had anticipated problems when she extracted some passages that were unusually candid about childbirth. Alcott agreed to these excisions, but then naively published them as notes in an appendix, providing the prurient and the hostile with easy reference. The reaction by the Unitarian establishment after the publication of the second volume of Conversations was swift and unambiguous. Joseph T. Buckingham, editor of the Boston Courier suggested if Alcott “be either honest or sincere, he must be insane or half-witted, and his friends ought to take care of him without delay.” Andrews Norton, a leading professor at Harvard Divinity School, sometimes called the Unitarian Pope, said the Conversations were “one third was absurd, one third was blasphemous, and one third obscene.”
In most accounts of the Temple School the prudery of these proper Bostonians is given as the main source of outrage. But this was only the most obvious part of the real offense, which was to completely reverse the normal direction of education from adult to child, from institution to individual, and from the textbook to the mind. That Alcott clothed the endeavor in Christian rhetoric and that he used as his epigram: “Except a Man be converted and become as a little Child. . .he cannot see,—nor enter into, —the kingdom of Heaven.” only exacerbated matters. Nathan Hale, editor of the Daily Advertiser, most fully tips his hand when he complains that Alcott’s main abuse of his students was “to accustom them to trifling and irreverent habits of reflection upon the most grave and solemn subjects. . . and to impress them with a degree of self-esteem, quite unfavorable.” It is not so much any particular subject matter as the process of reflection, stimulated by writing and talking, that opens a Pandora’s box out of which only Alcott and his fellow Transcendentalists could discern anything called Hope.
Although defended in print by Emerson and James Freeman Clarke, Alcott found the enrollment in his school soon dwindling, and by the summer of 1837 there were only eleven students. As it became impossible to continue the school, Emerson tried to console Alcott with prospect of writing for a future audience that might be more sympathetic to his views: “Write, let them hear or let them forbear—the written word abides until slowly & unexpectedly and in widely sundered places, it has created its own church.” Emerson’s advice was well intentioned, but inappropriate for Alcott in two ways. First, when Alcott wrote without the realities of his own classroom to anchor him, his writing became increasingly abstract, vaporous, confused. Unlike Emerson, Alcott himself paradoxically lacked the ability to use writing to clarify his thinking. The second reason Emerson’s advice to retreat and write was inappropriate for Alcott is that the latter saw writing as only part of a larger process, incomplete without embodiment: “I desire to see my Idea not only a written but a spoken and acted word” As he said of himself in an 1836 journal passage while the Temple School was at its height: “I am more successful, I apprehend, in the practical, than in the theoretic, exemplification, of my purposes. . . As I go on, light will be shed down upon the details of practice, from the high sun of principles, and my own mind will be able to reflect this light, as it is.” Alcott’s self-description of relating thought to action is exactly what Emerson articulated in the Emerson scholar, both the sense of using action to make the unconscious more conscious and the undulating dialectic between thought and action. At the height of the Temple School’s success, Alcott wrote: “My actual life, my experiments, are coming more and more before the public. These are the true test of my theories. . . So shall the testimony be authentic: the theory prove the practice, the practice be approved by the theory.”
Even after the circumstances surrounding Temple barred him from classroom work, he continued his commitment to education. His attempt to found a utopian community called Fruitlands proved fruitless, but the conversations he conducted with adults were generally successful as educational events if not financially. One encounter related to these is particularly significant for our narrative. In March of 1857 Alcott held a series of six conversations at Yale College. William Torrey Harris, a junior, was converted to Alcott’s brand of idealism by the experience. Ten years later, Harris invited Alcott to St. Louis to meet with the group that came to be known at the St. Louis Hegelians. Harris went on to become a key figure in American education, exerting a conservative force, emphasizing the value of textbooks and the differentiated curriculum against innovations that tried to make education more experiential and wholistic. While Harris’s conservatism should not be laid at Alcott’s feet, the connection between the two does suggest that a vision is transformative only in so far as it challenges conventional habits. Idealism was innovative in the hands of a traditionalist like James Marsh because it allowed him to see what the Lockean model missed. By Harris’s time idealism had become a rationale for existing educational practices and served as a defensive stance towards new weather in the intellectual climate such as Darwinism and pragmatic instrumentalism.
Even though Alcott’s career as a classroom teacher occupied only the earlier years of a long life, it had a kind of literary reincarnation in the writings of his daughter Louisa May, especially in her novel Little Men: Life at Plumfield with Jo’s Boys. In this idealized version the author creates a portrait of what an Alcottian boarding school might look like: the children—despite the book’s title there are both boys and girls—are put in marvelously educative surroundings, where they have farm animals and crops to care for, plenty of books, and a museum to furnish where they read to each other their essays on the exhibits. The problem boy is given his own cabinet, in which he can arrange and classify his natural history finds.
The Temple School represents the road not taken in American education. It was a place where imagination and intellect could flourish, unhampered by recitations and spelling tests. Its rapid demise was the fault of an uncomprehending public but also of a teacher who lacked the tact and the tactics to educate parents and the public as well as his students. But we are fortunate to have its record in such detail, not to follow methodically but as a spur to replicating its energies and openness in our own classrooms.