Early life

A native New Englander, Amos Bronson Alcott was born in the town of Wolcott in Connecticut's New Haven County His parents were Joseph Chatfield Alcott and Anna Alcott (née Bronson). The family home was in an area known as Spindle Hill, and his father, whose last name was spelt "Alcox" at birth, traced his ancestry to colonial-era settlers in eastern Massachusetts whose surname had been recorded as "Alcocke". Joseph adopted the spelling "Alcott" in his early youth.

Alcott taught himself to read. From the age of six until the age of thirteen he attended local schools and after that he was self-educated. His only close friend was his neighbor and second cousin William A. Alcott with whom he shared books and ideas. 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:

• Anna Bronson Alcott (March 16, 1831 - July 13, 1893)
• Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 - March 6, 1888)
• Elizabeth Sewall Alcott (June 24, 1835 - March 14, 1858)
• May Alcott (July 26, 1840 - December 29, 1879)

Educator

In 1834 he opened the Temple School in Boston. 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.

Alcott's methods were not well received; many found his conversations on the Gospels close to blasphemous. 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 - both of whom had been instrumental in founding Alcott House, a radical spirtual community and free school in Ham (near London). 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.

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.

Notes

Sources

• Alcott, Amos Bronson. Conversations with Children on the Gospels.
• Alcott, Amos Bronson. Letters of Amos Bronson Alcott.
• 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.
• F. B. Sanborn. Bronson Alcott at Alcott house, England, and Fruitlands, New England (1842-1844) (The Torch Press, 1908).