Our birthday celebrant today is an odd character; he entered into countless projects without the resources or abilities to see them through, and endured equally countless failures. He was a prolific writer, but his work (even at the time) has been criticized as mostly incoherent. He didn’t have any single accomplishment of particular note, but he’s still remembered, and at least two of his houses (he moved a lot) have been preserved since the 1800s and are now museums.
Amos Bronson Alcott was born on November 29 in 1799 in Connecticut, in the US. He didn’t get much education, and became a traveling salesman when he grew up. But he worried that living the life of an itinerant merchant was not good for him, so he took up a new career. Of all things, he chose teaching. He got several different teaching jobs, sometimes by starting his own school. He did that several times, but all of the schools failed financially. He got married when he was about 30, and he and his wife embarked on a predictable pattern: they would move to another community where Alcott would open a school. The school would, after a while, fail, and they’d move somewhere else and repeat the process. Along the way they eventually had four daughters, including Louisa May Alcott, who wrote (among other things) Little Women.
Around 1834 the Alcotts moved to Boston and opened the Temple School. The name wasn’t particularly significant; it was only because classes were held in the Masonic Temple on Tremont Street (it’s still there). While he was in Boston, Alcott got involved in the Transcendentalist movement, which was a quasi-religious philosophy. Alcott got involved by joining the Transcendental Club, where he met people like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
Transcendentalism influenced Alcott’s approach to teaching, which was already unusual for the time. He didn’t beat his students, didn’t believe in rote learning, and actually engaged the children in conversation. Not all the parents were convinced, and Alcott left Boston after just a couple of years. Emerson convinced them to move to Concord, Massachusetts, into a rented cottage close to his own house. Emerson tried to help Alcott with his writing, but eventually gave up, deeming Alcott’s work “unpublishable.” Alcott continued writing, though, and managed to publish some pamphlets and essays.
He must have made a good impression on Emerson, though, because he supported the always-impoverished Alcott family in a number of ways. He paid for Alcott to go on more than one lecture tour to promote his approach to teaching. Then in 1843 Alcott (probably with Emerson’s help once again) purchased a farm where he intended to create a utopian community. But he didn’t know anything about farming, and after he moved his family to the farm (which he named “Fruitlands” even though it wasn’t an orchard), he left on another lecture tour. The whole operation turned out to be a bit of a disaster. Alcott had moved his family to the farm late in the year, so they couldn’t do any farming even if they’d known how. Worse, the farm was on a hill and got extremely cold in the winter, and Alcott hadn’t provided enough wood to heat the house. He had apparently expected people to join the “community,” but that never happened either; only about 13 people ever showed up, and that included the Alcotts themselves. The Alcotts (minus Bronson) left the farm within a few months.
The family settled in another house in Concord, which finally became a stable base for them. Their finances improved, partly because Mrs. Alcott inherited money from her father. The Alcott children were able to have their own rooms, which enabled Louisa May (who was only 10 when they moved in) to begin to seriously pursue writing. And Alcott himself had eventually established enough of a reputation as an educator (or at least educational theorist) to be named the superintended of Concord schools.
In addition to his transcendentalism and educational theories, Alcott took a firm and very public stand against slavery, and made a big deal about voting for Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 election. He also attended protests and rallies, and wrote extensively about the evils of slavery.
He started yet another school in 1880, even though he was in his 80s by then, and the Concord School of Philosophy provided yet another innovation: it was intended for adults. It might have been the first adult education center in North America, and lasted for nine years.
Alcott died in 1888, just after his daughter Louisa May visited him. By coincidence, Alcott and his daughter shared the same birthday, November 29. And by another coincidence, she died just two days after her father.
