Amos Bronson Alcott
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Amos Bronson Alcott (November 29, 1799–March 4, 1888) was an American teacher and writer. He is remembered for founding a short-lived and unconventional school as well as a utopian community known as "Fruitlands," and for his association with Transcendentalism.
Alcott was born on Spindle Hill in the town of Wolcott, New Haven County, 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 early thrown upon his own resources, he began in 1814 to earn his living by working in a clock factory in Plymouth, Conn., 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 in 1828-1830, in Germantown, now part of Philadelphia, 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 he married Abby May, the sister of Samuel J. May (1797-1871), 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 John Brown and occasionally helped fugitive slaves escape on the Underground Railroad.
In 1834 he opened the Temple School in Boston, which became famous because of his original methods. Alcott's plan was to develop self-instruction on the basis of self-analysis, with an emphasis on conversation rather than the lecture and drill which were prevalent in U.S. classrooms of the time. The subject matter was often the Gospels, religious and moral principles; some of the school's conversations were published in Alcott's Conversations with Children on the Gospels. Alcott 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. As assistants in the school Alcott had two of nineteenth-century America's most talented women writers, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (who published A Record of Mr. Alcott's School in 1835) and Margaret Fuller; as students he had the children of the Boston intellectual classes, including Josiah Quincy, grandson of the president of Harvard. Alcott's methods were not well received; many in the church found his conversations on the Gospels close to blasphemous, and many in the public found his disciplinary measures ridiculous. The school was denounced in the press and rejected by most public opinion, and was not pecuniarily successful as the controversy caused many parents to remove their students. Finally Alcott alienated many of the remaining parents by admitting an African American child 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. His pedagogy was a forerunner of progressive and democratic schooling.
In 1840 Alcott removed 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, a 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 home near that of Ralph Waldo Emerson in Concord, removing to Boston four years later, and again living in Concord after 1857.
He spoke, as opportunity offered, 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 dwelt upon the illumination of the mind and soul by direct communion with the Creative 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 teaching was, and is still, often thought inconsistent, hazy or abrupt. But though he formulated no system of philosophy, and seemed to show the influence now of Plato, now of Kant, or of German thought as filtered through the brain of Coleridge, he was, like Emerson, steadily optimistic, idealistic, individualistic. The teachings of Dr. William Ellery Channing a little before had laid the groundwork for the work of most of the Concord Transcendentalists and contributors to The Dial, of whom Alcott was one.
In his last years, his daughter, the writer Louisa May Alcott, provided for him. Alcott was gratified at being able to become the nominal, and at times the actual, head of a Concord "Summer School of Philosophy and Literature", which had its first session in 1879, and in which, in a building next to his house, listeners were addressed during a part of several successive summers on many themes in philosophy, religion and letters.
Alcott's published books, all from late in his life, included Tablets (1868), Concord Days (1872), Sonnets and Canzonets (1882). Earlier he had written a series of "Orphic Sayings" which were published in The Dial as examples of Transcendentalist thought. The sayings, though called oracular, were considered sloppy, or vague by contemporary commentators as well as twentieth-century ones. He left a large collection of personal jottings and memorabilia, most of which remain unpublished. He died in Boston on the 4th of March 1888.
References
- Alcott, Amos Bronson. Conversations with Children on the Gospels.
- Geraldine Brooks. "Orpheus at the Plough." The New Yorker, January 10, 2005, pp. 58-65. (The New Yorker article (http://geraldinebrooks.com/march_alcott.shtml) is reproduced on author's website)de:Amos Bronson Alcott