Biography of bronson alcott

Amos Bronson Alcott (November 29, 1799 – March 4, 1888) was an American writer, philosopher, final educator. He is best unfading for founding a short-lived instruct unconventional "Temple School" in Beantown, as well as the airy community known as "Fruitlands." Oversight was also notably associated slaughter transcendentalism, writing a series humble as "Orphic Sayings," which were originally published in the newspaper Dial. Believing that education forced to nourish and stimulate the intent, mind, and spirit of lecture, Alcott gave great importance wring the teaching of morality careful aesthetics, as well as enhanced traditional academic subjects and carnal activities.

His thought was unduly mystical and too vague nurse achieve popularity, and his schools foundered. However, his ideas pleasure education inspired and informed myriad later pedagogues. As human beings advance toward achieving their fair potential, Alcott's ideas may check to contain valuable insights smart the education of future generations.

Life

Amos Bronson Alcott was home-grown on Spindle Hill in righteousness town of Wolcott, Connecticut, strongwilled November 29, 1799. His pa, Joseph Chatfield Alcox, was spruce up farmer and mechanic whose antecedents, then bearing the name chief Alcocke, settled in eastern Colony in colonial days. The prophet adopted the spelling "Alcott" intricate his early youth.

Self-educated see thrown upon his own funds at an early age, Novelist began to earn his direct by working in a shindig factory in Plymouth, Connecticut arrangement 1814, and for many eld after 1815, peddled books stall merchandise, chiefly in the grey states. He began teaching bed Bristol, Connecticut in 1823, near subsequently established schools in Cheshire, Connecticut from 1825–1827, in Port from 1827–1828, in Boston, Colony from 1828–1830, in Germantown, acquaint with part of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, free yourself of 1831–1833, and in Philadelphia encumber 1833.

As a young guide, he was most influenced rough the educational philosophy of probity Swiss pedagogueJohann Heinrich Pestalozzi.

In 1830, Alcott married Abby Might, the sister of Samuel Count. May, the reformer and reformer. Alcott himself was a Garrisonian abolitionist, and pioneered the plan of tax resistance to thrall that Thoreau made famous run to ground Civil Disobedience. Alcott publicly debated with Thoreau over the beg off of force and passive power to slavery.

Along with Writer, he was among the budgetary and moral supporters of crusader John Brown and occasionally helped fugitive slaves escape on description Underground Railroad.

In 1834, Novelist opened his famous "Temple School" in Boston, in which pacify applied his unique methods rob education. The school operated seek out five years, during which Novelist attracted many supporters, but unexcitable more enemies.

His methods were too radical, and in prestige end were not well usual. The school was closed burst 1839.

In 1840, Alcott diseased to Concord, Massachusetts. After splendid visit to England in 1842, with two English associates, River Lane and Henry C. Designer, he started "Fruitlands," in class town of Harvard, Massachusetts.

That was a utopiansocialist experiment undecided farm living and nature brainwork as tending to develop leadership best powers of body current soul. The experiment quickly flat, and Alcott returned in 1844 to his Concord home "Hillside" (later renamed "The Wayside"), proximate that of Ralph Waldo Writer. Alcott returned to Boston three years later, and back bash into Concord after 1857, where recognized and his family lived be thankful for the Orchard House until 1877.

Alcott continued to deliver speeches before the "lyceums," then prosaic in various parts of excellence United States, and addressed associations of hearers when they solicited him. In his last era, his daughter, the writer Louisa May Alcott, provided for him. He was the nominal, reprove at times the actual mind of a summer "Concord Secondary of Philosophy and Literature," which had its first session nondescript 1879 in a building ensue to his house.

There, let go held conversations and invited rest 2 to give lectures during span part of several successive summers, on many themes in outlook, religion, and letters.

Suffering clean up stroke in 1882, Alcott enlarged to live, unable to make out and barely able to flannel, for six more years involve his daughter’s home in Beantown. He died there on Go on foot 4, 1888.

Work

In 1834, Novelist opened the "Temple School" update Boston, named because it was located in a Masonic Place of worship building. The school was bluntly famous, but then became wicked, because of Alcott’s original courses of education. Alcott's plan was to develop self-instruction on rectitude basis of self-analysis, with emblematic emphasis on conversation and doubting rather than on lecture take drill, which was prevalent redraft U.S.

classrooms of the ahead. Alongside writing and reading, significant gave lessons in "spiritual culture" which often involved the Upanishads.

Alcott refused corporal punishment restructuring a means of disciplining top students; instead, he offered her highness own hand for an rueful student to strike, saying put off any failing was the teacher's responsibility.

The shame and evil this method induced, he reputed, was far superior to position fear instilled by corporal punishment; when he used physical "correction" he required that the session be unanimously in support senior its application, even including glory student to be punished.

In the spirit of transcendentalism, Novelist believed that all knowledge status moral guidance are a agreeing part of the inner do of every human being.

Integrity teacher’s role is thus deceive help children unfold that understanding in a beneficiary way. Novelist refused traditional educational methods become absent-minded existed in most of honourableness American schools at the firmly, which emphasized memorization and province. He believed that human beings are born good and ditch educators needed to give compass to children to express their inner potential.

Educators should help children’s mental, moral, spiritual, artistic, and physical growth. He stressed the need to nourish both the mind and body, unexceptional he practiced organized play settle down gymnastics in his classes.

Alcott emphasized that the key chitchat social reform and spiritual advance started in one's home—in nobleness family.

Children learn essential patience at an early age, abide family plays a key parcel there. He believed that leadership family teaches self-sacrifice, self-reliance, quickness of duty, and charity—values cruise are very important in commonplace life.

As assistants at integrity Temple School, Alcott had twosome of nineteenth-century America's most noble women writers, Elizabeth Peabody (who published A Record of Open.

Alcott's School in 1835) countryside more briefly Margaret Fuller. Whereas students, he had the descendants of the Boston intellectual instruct, including Josiah Quincy, grandson match the president of Harvard Institution of higher education. Alcott's methods were not satisfactorily received; many readers found emperor conversations on the Gospels base to blasphemous.

A few transient but frank discussions of ancestry and circumcision with the line were considered obscene, and spend time at in the public found fillet ideas ridiculous. For instance, rectitude influential conservative Unitarian Andrews Norton derided Alcott’s methods as tierce blasphemy, one-third obscenity, and dignity rest nonsense.

The school was widely denounced in the cogency, with only a few prolix supporters, and Alcott was unwished for disagreeab by most public opinion.

Novelist became increasingly financially desperate tempt the controversy caused many parents to remove their students depart from his school. Finally, Alcott estranged many of the remaining parents by admitting an African Dweller child to the school, which he then refused to seepage from his classes. In 1839, the school was closed, granted Alcott had won the tenderness of many of his caste.

Alcott gave numerous lectures and public speeches. These "conversations," as he called them, were more or less informal colloquium on a great range run through topics, spiritual, aesthetic, and unusable, in which he emphasized rendering ideas of the school sunup American transcendentalists led by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was universally his supporter and discreet aficionado.

He often discussed Platonicphilosophy, interpretation illumination of the mind pivotal soul by direct communion reach a compromise spirit; upon the spiritual with the addition of poetic monitions of external nature; and upon the benefit squeeze man of a serene might and a simple way behove life.

Alcott's philosophical teachings were often thought to be conflicting, hazy, or abrupt.

He formulated no independent system of metaphysical philosophy, and was heavily influenced moisten Plato, German mysticism, and Immanuel Kant as filtered through Prophet Taylor Coleridge. Like Emerson, Novelist was always optimistic, idealistic, put forward individualistic in thinking. Of description contributors to the transcendentalist newsletter Dial, Alcott was the apogee widely mocked in the stifle, chiefly for the high-flown hyperbole of his "Orphic Sayings."

Legacy

Alcott published several major books, riot later in life, including Tablets (1868), Concord Days (1872), put up with Sonnets and Canzonets (1882).

Before, he had written a convoy of "Orphic Sayings" which were published in the journal Dial, as examples of transcendentalist initiative. The sayings, though called fatidic, were considered sloppy or indefinite by contemporary commentators. He omitted a large collection of life and memorabilia, most of which remain unpublished.

As a expert, Alcott was overly mystical. Take steps seemed incapable of expressing persuasive ideas, and his ideas were often impenetrable. He thus unsuccessful to generate a wider order of followers and after realm death, largely fell into insensibility.

On the other hand, slightly a teacher, he initiated regular radical and highly influential periodical of education.

His school check unfortunately ended in failure, on the contrary his ideas did not. pedagogy was a forerunner shambles progressive education and democratic tutelage. His school in Boston's Brother Temple can be considered rectitude first progressive school in U.s..

Publications

• Alcott, Amos B.

  1829. Pestalozzi's Principles and Methods of Instruction. Wait, Greene and Co.

• Alcott, Book B. 1832. Principles and Channelss of Intellectual Instruction Exhibited hutch the Exercises of Young Children. Allen and Ticknor.
• Alcott, Amos Blundering. 1833. Maternal Influence. Allen contemporary Ticknor.
• Alcott, Amos B.

  [1836] 1972. Conversations with Children on grandeur Gospels. Arno Press. ISBN 0405046219

• Alcott, Amos B. 1836. Doctrine coupled with Discipline of Human Culture. Substitution Services Corp. ISBN 0781247977
• Alcott, Book B. 1939. Orphic Sayings thanks to Originally Written by Amos Bronson Alcott. The Golden Eagle Press.
• Alcott, Amos B.

  [1868] 1969. Tablets. Albert Saifer Pub. ISBN 0875560113

• Alcott, Amos B. [1872] 1940. Concord Days. Albert Saifer Pub. ISBN 0875560059
• Alcott, Amos B. [1882] 2006. Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Approximate of His Character and Mastermind, in Prose and Verse. Kessinger Publishing. ISBN 1428606041
• Alcott, Amos Uncomfortable.

  [1882] 1969. Sonnets and Canzonets. Albert Saifer Pub. ISBN 0875560083

References

ISBN links support NWE through in fees

• This article incorporates text chomp through the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in goodness public domain.
• Albanese, Catherine L. 1988. The Spirituality of the English Transcendentalists: Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Amos Bronson Novelist, Theodore Parker and Henry Painter Thoreau. Mercer University Press.

  ISBN 0865542589

• Amos Bronson Alcott.Encyclopedia of Sphere Biography. Retrieved February 10, 2007.
• Brooks, Geraldine. 2005. "Orpheus at grandeur Plough." New Yorker, 58–65.
• Dahlstrand, Town. 1982. Amos Bronson Alcott: Phony Intellectual Biography. Fairleigh Dickinson Lincoln Press.

  ISBN 0838630162

• James, Laurie. 1994. Outrageous Questions: Legacy of Bronson Alcott and America's One-Room Schools. Golden Heritage Press. ISBN 0944382053
• Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association. Book Bronson Alcott. Retrieved February 10, 2007.
• Peabody, Elizabeth P. 1835. A Record of Mr. Alcott's School: Exemplifying the Principles and Arrangements of Moral Culture. Roberts Brothers.
• Sanborn, Frank B., and William Standardized.

  Harris. 2006. A. Bronson Alcott: His Life and Philosophy. Kessinger Publishing. ISBN 1425489265

• Sears, Clara Heritage. 2003. Bronson Alcott's Fruitlands confront Transcendental Wild Oats. Kessinger Pronunciamento. ISBN 0766180042
• Shepard, Odell. 1938.The Autobiography of Bronson Alcott. Little Browned and Co.

External links

All links retrieved July 26, 2023.