Alcott, (Amos) Bronson

Alcott, [Amos] Bronson (1799–1888), born in Connecticut, had little formal education, and early attempted to support himself as a peddler in the Southern states and as a schoolteacher in New England and Pennsylvania (1823–33). His educational ideas, continued in his Temple School at Boston (1834–39) and later in his work as school superintendent at Concord and elsewhere, were characterized by an attempt to create the harmonious development of the physical, intellectual, aesthetic, and moral natures, with stress placed on imagination. To achieve this end, he favored a conversational method of instruction, attempted to beautify the school surroundings and to give study and instruction the aspect of recreation, and introduced such innovations as gymnastics, organized play, and the honor system. His philosophy, mediating between the extreme idealistic and materialistic positions, was summed up in the term Personalism. Alcott was an extreme Transcendentalist, yet he was opposed to its doctrine of individualism and believed that all seemingly separate minds are linked by a common relation to a central Mind; that is, as he said, “all souls have a Personal identity with God and abide in Him.” His philosophy, his theory of infant education founded “on the great principle that every infant is already in possession of the faculties and apparatus required for his instruction,” his later emphasis on birth or heredity as more important than education and environment in determining character, and his social conscience were all bound up with his own integrated and benevolent personality. In 1835 Alcott's assistant at the Temple School, Elizabeth Peabody, edited his Record of a School, Exemplifying the General Principles of Spiritual Culture; this was followed by two volumes of his Conversations with Children on the Gospels (1836–37). These books, setting forth his theory and practice of education, won Alcott the support of such friends as Channing, Emerson, and J.F. Clarke, but lost him many pupils, whose parents considered his ideas dangerous and improper, so that the school was finally abandoned. In 1840 he moved with his wife and children to Concord, where he attempted to live by farming an acre of land, but this also failed. He then went to England (May–Oct. 1842), where an Alcott House had been founded to experiment with his educational ideas, and met Carlyle, who found the voluble American tiresome, but described him as being “like a venerable Don Quixote, whom nobody can laugh at without loving.” In the U.S. again, in the company of a group of mystics, Alcott made plans for a cooperative community, which resulted in the ill‐fated experiment at Fruitlands. This transcendental, communal, vegetarian organization persisted for only seven months, and in January 1845 the family returned to Concord. There and elsewhere, Alcott continued to lecture and to hold informal “conversations” to disseminate his ideas, meanwhile being supported mainly by the labors of his wife and his daughter Louisa May Alcott. Not until 1868 did they become financially independent, when Louisa published Little Women, based on the family life during her childhood. In 1859 Alcott became superintendent of Concord schools, where he introduced the teaching of singing, dancing, reading aloud, and such novel subjects as physiology. This work and his endeavors in higher education that culminated in the Concord School of Philosophy (1879–88), a profound influence on U.S. education through his disciple W.T. Harris and others, embodied not only his philosophic ideas but also his genius for conversation and his personal influence. His serene unworldliness, his idealism in the midst of a material world, and his preoccupation with his own ideas and innumerable reforms made his practical relations with his family and friends difficult, although he considered the Family a golden mean between the hermit's cell and the phalanstery, and his home life was beautiful and generally happy. Carlyle had looked upon him indulgently as a man “bent on saving the world by a return to acorns and the golden age”; but Emerson said, “As pure intellect I have never seen his equal”; and Thoreau agreed that he was “the sanest man I ever knew.” As an apostle of Transcendentalism, his medium was “conversation,” in which he informally developed his ideas and personality. In this spontaneous art, Alcott exhibited the most lucid and brilliant aspects of his thought, but, as it inevitably died with him, his reputation waned when he could be approached only through the colder medium of his writings. Among his early books on education were Observations on the Principles and Methods of Infant Instruction (1830) and The Doctrine and Discipline of Human Culture (1836). Later writings include the mystical Orphic Sayings, published in The Dial (1840–41); Tablets (1868); Ralph Waldo Emerson (1865, 1882), a laudatory estimate of Emerson's character and genius in both prose and verse; Concord Days (1872), a work based on his journals; and Table Talk (1877). New Connecticut (1887) is a poetical autobiography of his youth, and Sonnets and Canzonets (1882) is a volume written in memory of his wife. A selection from his Journals was published in 1938 and from his Letters in 1969.