Miss Peabody and Amos Bronson Alcott breathed
books, and they figured in them as well, not just as biographical subjects but
as characters in fiction (Alcott, as the absent Father March in Little Women;
Elizabeth, as the elderly feminist reformer “Miss Birdseye” in Henry James’
The Bostonians). They shared a passion for enkindling young minds, and
for a while it seemed that their educational venture would be one of the
brightest points in the intellectual movement centered around Boston.
But their idealistic vision of an experimental
institution headed by Alcott, Boston’s Temple School (pictured), ended in acute
embarrassment and failure.
The lives of Alcott and Peabody had amply demonstrated
that they were unafraid to strike out in bold new directions. Those
experiences, however, also underlined the differences in temperament that would
corrode their collaboration.
The son of a Connecticut farmer, Alcott had, through a
rigorous program of self-improvement, advanced in learning enough that his
friend Ralph Waldo Emerson thought he could converse with Plato.
By 1828, he was speculating in his journal how to take
children on a similar journey of learning, observing that the “province of the
instructor is awakening, invigorating, directing, rather than forcing a 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 his system. The
Child is the Book. The operations of his mind are the try system.”
Peabody was one of a trio of sisters who were a key
part of intellectual circles in antebellum America—“The Flowering of New
England,” as critic Van Wyck Brooks later termed it. (Mary Peabody, a reformer
with literary inclinations, married politician and educator Horace Mann. Sophia
Peabody, a talented painter, wed novelist and short-story writer Nathaniel
Hawthorne.)
Elizabeth assisted and advocated for a series of what literary scholar and philanthropist Millicent Bell called “husbands of the mind”—the minister William Ellery Channing, Emerson, and Mann.
Along with Margaret Fuller, she was one of only two female members of the
Transcendental Club who instigated a kind of intellectual American Revolution
of the 19th century.
The daughter of a schoolteacher, Elizabeth had been
educating students herself since the age of 16. A biographer of her family,
Megan Marshall, has observed that schools operated by women were freer than
their male counterparts to experiment.
In Alcott, this selfless, even devoted, collaborator
with innovators thought she glimpsed a kindred male soul working towards an
enlightened alternative to the educational practices of their time.
It would take close personal and work encounters for
her to discover the infinite frustrations that others discovered about this
original, radical but eccentric thinker. Emerson captured both what drew people
to Alcott and what annoyed them about him: he was “a good and guileless man,”
but also “a man of genius with few talents.”
Impractical and improvident, Alcott continually drove
his family to the brink of poverty with his schemes—and drove his followers to
distraction. Among his dominant characteristics was a propensity towards being
out of sync with his age. Depending on the strength and timing of this impulse,
he could be a dreamer, an idealist, a visionary…or just a plain fool. He
disregarded the counsels of caution—including entreaties from women with his
best interests in mind, such as his wife Abby and Elizabeth—bringing his
projects to repeated ruin.
The property he settled on in 1834 for his new ideas,
a grand, converted Masonic Temple overlooking the Boston Common, was christened
Temple School. His classrooms featured comfortable desks, slates and objects
for handling and counting—all innovations of the time.
Remarkably for male teachers of the period, for
instance, he preferred Socratic dialogue—or, as he called them,
“conversations”—with young students to rote learning. Moreover, rather than
resort to corporal punishment, he rapped his own knuckles rather than the
youthful offender’s.
In their stress on this more open communication
between student and teacher, Alcott and Peabody anticipated the theories of
progressive education advanced by John Dewey.
With the same zeal she had devoted to Channing in
transcribing the Unitarian minister’s diffuse sermon notes into a collection of
coherent addresses, Elizabeth threw herself into the Temple School. She steered
her own students to the school, and recorded the conversations of Alcott.
Alcott would address the students in general terms in
the morning, while Peabody—possessing the qualifications to teach Latin, geography
and arithmetic that he lacked—concentrated on particular subjects in the
afternoon.
As time went on, though, Peabody couldn’t help
noticing that Alcott, though an advocate for open communication between teacher
and student, didn’t practice this with her.
After she accepted his invitation to stay at the
family’s boarding house, she found herself disagreeing with him, more often,
more vigorously and more uncomfortably—and he did little to hide his journal
rant that she was exhibiting “too much of the man and too little of the woman
in her freedom.”
In particular, while Alcott was delighted by Peabody’s
popular account of his pedagogy, Record of a School (1835), he overrode
her qualms about a projected sequel, Conversations With Children on the
Gospels. Her initial concerns about how these recorded conversations
revealed his self-aggrandizement and manipulation of children’s thoughts and
behavior soon gave way to outright alarm frank classroom discussions of
sexuality.
One child’s answer to Alcott’s question on how the
body is made—“by the naughtiness of people”—was bound to provoke controversy,
both because of its precocity and its source: six-year-old Josiah Quincy, the
grandson of the president of Harvard.
Tired of Alcott’s increasing disregard of her
concerns, anxious about Abby’s occasional tempestuousness, and unable to
continue her volunteer teaching, Elizabeth withdrew from Temple School at the
start of August. The storm that erupted later that year with the publication of
Conversations With Children on the Gospels confirmed the worst of her
fears.
The outcry was widespread, with perhaps the sharpest
reaction registered by Andrews Norton, a professor of sacred literature at
Harvard, who called it “one third absurd, one third blasphemous, and one third
obscene.”
In its fervor, the uproar over Alcott’s unusual
teaching resembles a modern culture war. It provoked the same outrage over
touching on sexuality (no matter how gauzily Alcott expressed it), and the same
tensions between religious conservatism (in this case, traditional Calvinism)
and less sect-based spirituality (Transcendental philosophy).
Then as now, there were limits to what the enlightened
elite was prepared to tolerate. That boundary was breached the following year,
when Alcott admitted a single black student to the school. This attempt at
racial integration led the parents who had previously stood by Alcott to
withdraw the remaining students.
Once Temple School finally closed in 1837, an entry in
Alcott’s recently transcribed journal notes that he suffered a nervous collapse
that lasted a week. Alcott operated another school for one more year until it,
too, shut its doors. Thereafter, though he served briefly as superintendent of
Concord Public Schools in Connecticut two decades later, he never taught again.
Peabody, tougher and more resilient than her former employer, survived the failure of their experiment in much better shape. Staying at the Concord home of the Emerson family revived her spirits.
The
Boston bookshop she ran in the 1840s did much to spread Transcendentalism to
the reading public, and later she made her most lasting contribution to
American education by helping to import the kindergarten movement from Germany
to this country.
Over a decade ago, while visiting Concord, I stopped
by Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. On that crisp autumn morning, I marveled that so
many of the nation’s most prominent 19th-century literary lights—including
Emerson, Thoreau, and Louisa May Alcott—were in as close proximity on this
still hillside as they had been in life.
Now, however, thinking of two of those buried there—Bronson
Alcott and Elizabeth Peabody—what strikes me is not the quiet of their
surroundings but the loud reverberations of their dialogues about Temple School—of
the continuing debates over how to mold young minds and how to introduce
innovation into a skeptical world.
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