Amos Bronson Alcott

A. Bronson Alcott

Amos Bronson Alcott (born November 29, 1799 – died March 4, 1888) was an American writer, phylosopher and educator, remembered for founding a short-lived and unconventional "Temple School" in Boston, as well as an utopian community known as "Fruitlands", and for his association with Transcendentalism.

Life

Amos Bronson Alcott was born on Spindle Hill in the town of Wolcott, in Connecticut. His father, Joseph Chatfield Alcox, was a farmer and mechanic whose ancestors, then bearing the name of Alcocke, had settled in eastern Massachusetts in colonial days. The son adopted the spelling "Alcott" in his early youth.

Self-educated and thrown early upon his own resources, Alcott began in 1814 to earn his living by working in a clock factory in Plymouth, Connecticut, and for many years after 1815 he peddled books and merchandise, chiefly in the southern states. He began teaching in Bristol, Connecticut in 1823, and subsequently conducted schools in Cheshire, Connecticut, in 1825-1827, again in Bristol in 1827-1828, in Boston, Massachusetts in 1828-1830, in Germantown, now part of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1831-1833, 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 1830 Alcott married Abby May, the sister of Samuel J. May, the reformer and abolitionist. Alcott himself was a Garrisonian abolitionist, and pioneered the strategy of tax resistance to slavery which 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 abolitionist John Brown and occasionally helped fugitive slaves escape on the Underground Railroad.

In 1834 Alcott opened his famous "Temple School" in Boston, in which he applied his unique methods of education. The school operated for five years, during which Alcott attracted many supporters but even more enemies. His methods were too radical, and at the end were not well received. The school was closed in 1839.

In 1840 Alcott moved to Concord, Massachusetts. After a visit to England, in 1842, he started with two English associates, Charles Lane and Henry C. Wright, at "Fruitlands", in the town of Harvard, Massachusetts, an utopian socialist experiment in farm living and nature meditation as tending to develop the best powers of body and soul. The experiment quickly collapsed, and Alcott returned in 1844 to his Concord home "Hillside" (later renamed "The Wayside") near that of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Alcott removed to Boston four years later, and again back to Concord after 1857, where he and his family lived in the Orchard House until 1877.

Alcott continued to deliver speeches before the "lyceums", then common in various parts of the United States, and addressed groups of hearers when they invited him. In his last years, his daughter, the writer Louisa May Alcott, provided for him. He was the nominal, and at times the actual, head of a summer "Concord School of Philosophy and Literature", which had its first session in 1879, and in which, in a building next to his house, he held conversations and invited others to give lectures during a part of several successive summers on many themes in philosophy, religion and letters.

Suffering a stroke in 1882, Alcott continued to live, unable to write and barely able to talk, for six more years in his daughter’s house in Boston. He died there on March 4, 1888.

Work

In 1834 Alcott opened the "Temple School" in Boston, so called because it was located in a Masonic Temple building. The school was briefly famous, but then became infamous, because of Alcott’s original methods of education. Alcott's plan was to develop self-instruction on the basis of self-analysis, with an emphasis on conversation and questioning rather than the lecture and drill which were prevalent in U.S. classrooms of the time. Alongside writing and reading, he gave lessons in "spiritual culture" which often involved the Gospels.

Alcott sometimes refused 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.

In the spirit of Transcendentalism, Alcott believed that all knowledge and moral guidance are a consistent part of the inner self of every human being. The teacher’s role is thus to help children unfold that knowledge in a beneficiary way. Alcott refused traditional educational methods that existed in most of the American schools at the time, and that emphasized memorization and discipline. He believed that human beings were born good, and that educators need to give freedom to children to express their inner potential. Educators should facilitate children’s mental, moral, spiritual, esthetical, and physical growth. He emphasized the need to nourish both mind and body, so he practiced in his classes organized play and gymnastics.

Alcott emphasized that the key to social reform and spiritual growth started in the home, in one’s family. Children learn essential values in an early age, and family plays key role here. Family teaches about self-sacrifice, self-reliance, sense of duty, and charity - the values that are so important in daily life.

As assistants in the Temple School, Alcott had two of nineteenth-century America's most talented women writers, Elizabeth Peabody (who published A Record of Mr. Alcott's School in 1835) and more briefly Margaret Fuller. As students he had the children of the Boston intellectual classes, including Josiah Quincy, grandson of the president of Harvard University. Alcott's methods were not well received; many readers found his conversations on the Gospels close to blasphemous, a few brief but frank discussions of birth and circumcision with the children were considered obscene, and many in the public found his ideas ridiculous. For instance, the influential conservative Unitarian Andrews Norton 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. And Alcott was increasingly financially desperate as the controversy caused many parents to remove their students. Finally Alcott alienated many of the remaining parents by admitting an African American child to the school, whom he then refused to expel from his classes. In 1839 the school was closed, although Alcott had won the affection of many of his pupils.

File:The Wayside, Concord, Massachusetts.JPG

The Wayside, home in turn to the Alcott family, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Margaret Sidney.

Alcott gave numerous lectures and public speeches. 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 Ralph Waldo 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.

Alcott's philosophical teachings were, often thought to be inconsistent, hazy or abrupt. He formulated no independent system of philosophy, and was heavily influenced by Plato, German mysticism, and Immanuel Kant as filtered through Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Like Emerson, Alcott was always optimistic, idealistic, and individualistic in thinking. Of the contributors to the Transcendentalist journal The Dial, Alcott was by far the most widely mocked in the press, chiefly for the high-flown rhetoric of his "Orphic Sayings."

Legacy

Alcott's published several major books, all later in life, including Tablets (1868), Concord Days (1872), and Sonnets and Canzonets (1882). Earlier he had written a series of Orphic Sayings which were published in the journal The Dial, as examples of Transcendentalist thought. The sayings, though called oracular, were considered sloppy or vague by contemporary commentators. He left a large collection of journals and memorabilia, most of which remain unpublished.

As a teacher, he initiated a radical and highly influential re-thinking of education. His school experiment unfortunately ended up in failure, but his ideas did not. His pedagogy was a forerunner of progressive education and democratic schooling. His school in Boston's Masonic Temple was the first progressive school in America.

On the other side, as a philosopher, Alcott was too vague and overly mystical. He was incapable of expressing clear ideas and his ideas were often impenetrable. He thus failed to generate wider followers and after his death he largely fell into oblivion.

Publications

• Alcott, Amos B. 1829. Pestalozzi's principles and methods of instruction. Wait, Greene & Co.
• Alcott, Amos B. 1832. Principles and methods of intellectual instruction exhibited in the exercises of young children. Allen and Ticknor
• Alcott, Amos B. 1833. Maternal Influence. Allen & Ticknor
• Alcott, Amos B. 1836. Doctrine and Discipline of Human Culture. Reprint Services Corp. ISBN 0781247977
• Alcott, Amos B. 1939. Orphic Sayings As Originally Written By Amos Bronson Alcott. The Golden Eagle Press.
• Alcott, Amos B. 1940 (original published in 1872). Concord Days. Albert Saifer Pub. ISBN 0875560059
• Alcott, Amos B. 1969 (original published in 1882). Sonnets and Canzonets. Albert Saifer Pub. ISBN 0875560083
• Alcott, Amos B. 1969 (original published in 1868). Tablets. Albert Saifer Pub. ISBN 0875560113
• Alcott, Amos B. 1972 (original published in 1836). Conversations with Children on the Gospels. Arno Press. ISBN 0405046219
• Alcott, Amos B. 2006 (original published in 1882). Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Estimate of His Character and Genius, in Prose and Verse. Kessinger Publishing. ISBN 1428606041

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
• Albanese, Catherine L. 1988. The Spirituality of the American Transcendentalists: Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Amos Bronson Alcott, Theodore Parker and Henry David Thoreau. Mercer University Press. ISBN 0865542589
• BookRags.com. Encyclopedia of World Biography on Amos Bronson Alcott. Retrieved on February 10, 2007, <http://www.bookrags.com/biography/amos-bronson-alcott/>
• Brooks, Geraldine. 2005. Orpheus at the Plough. The New Yorker, January 10, pp. 58-65. Retrieved on February 10, 2007, <http://geraldinebrooks.com/march_alcott.shtml>
• Dahlstrand, Frederick. 1982. Amos Bronson Alcott: An Intellectual Biography. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. ISBN 0838630162
• James, Laurie. 1994. Outrageous Questions: Legacy of Bronson Alcott and America's One-Room Schools. Golden Heritage Press Inc. ISBN 0944382053
• Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association. Amos Bronson Alcott. Retrieved on February 10, 2007, <http://www.louisamayalcott.org/bronsontext.html>
• Peabody, Elisabeth P. 1835. A Record of Mr. Alcott's School: Exemplifying the principles and methods of moral culture. Roberts brothers.
• Sanborn, Frank B. & William T. Harris. 2006. A. Bronson Alcott: His Life and Philosophy. Kessinger Publishing. ISBN 1425489265
• Sears, Clara E. 2003. Bronson Alcott's Fruitlands with Transcendental Wild Oats. Kessinger Publishing. ISBN 0766180042

External links

• Alcott’s Net – Website dedicated to Alcott’s philosophy
• Biography – Alcott’s biography at the American Transcendentalism website
• Life of Amos Bronson Alcott – Biography
• Luisa May Alcott – Biography of Alcott’s daughter Luisa May
• On life and work of Amos B. Alcott – Short biography and his work
• Quotations – Some Alcott’s quotations
• Ralph Waldo Emerson – Who was R.W. Emerson?
• The Forester - Alcott's tribute to his dying friend Henry Thoreau, published in the April 1862 Atlantic Monthly
• Transcendentalism – What is “Transcendentalism”?

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