cavell: emerson/dewey

Cavell, forward to The Gleam of Light: Moral Perfectionism and Education in Dewey and Emerson, by Naoko Saito [Fordham 2006]

 

xiv: “Emerson, strikingly, does not divide philosophy into fields, but all of his writing can be seen as directed to what he calls the youth or the student, so that the totality of it embodies a pedagogical ambition, implicitly declaring that his culture as a whole stands in need of education.”

notes that he sees tension as well as relation between the two: transcendentalism and pragmatism

—-

2: dewey: philosophy as education

want to reclaim dewey by way of emerson: and education as spirit, language of inspiration that can’t be fully grasped in langauge of standardization

5: her sense of deweyan growth (which she will read in light of Emersonian moral perfectionism): education has no end beyond itself, one with growing. thus Dewey shifts from Hegelian absolute, fixed end (might we say metaphor, paradigm?) to Darwinian evolution/naturalism:growth as contingent, natural process (thus metonymic?)

10: the heart of Cavell’s emersonian moral perfectionism: the idea of philosophy as education, the ‘education of grown-ups’

dewey’s language, in dialogue with emerson and cavell, reclaimed as the language of education. [might not also we then need to reclaim emerson’s language for education?]

11: emerson and dewey’s process-oriented idea of perfectionist education: a naturalized (secular) notion of conversion: taking place in here and now, again and again.

douglass anderson, philosophy americana: chapter that takes up cavell’s read of emerson and his neglect of the emerson-dewey connection. [his introduction: focus on teaching, tensions in university]

great line from dewey that aligns with Emerson looking back on seapration of his work and teaching: “Too rarely is the individual teacher so free from the dictation of authoritative supervisor, textbook on methods, prescribed course of study, etc., that he can lets his mind come to close quarters with the pupil’s mind and the subject matter.” (MW 9:116)–from Democracy and education, chapter 8, aims in education (on the vice of externally imposed ends)

Emerson: education readings

 

Cremin, American Education: The National Experience, 1783-1876.

Harper and Row, 1980.

 

Observations/uses: Foremost, note the significance given to Emerson as a subject by himself in the history of american education: an entire section of a chapter, the chapter that earlier includes, Franklin and Noah Webster.

[sacks in ‘understanding emreson’ cites cremin: ‘no single figure more influential in education of 19thc. Americans’]

Note the way brief reference is made to “brief period of schoolteaching” but no investigation of it [reiterating the sense that it was a stop along the way]

Primarily reads and summarizes American Scholar and Education

 

Emphasizes the ‘breadth of emerson’s idea of education’ as both its influence [appeal and access for popular audience/lectures] and also perhaps hints at why it is not formally taken up in american education: its polarity and its resistance to institution.

 

Concludes the section with implication that unlike franklin who turned his education philosophy into an autobiography, emerson did not; insteady taught his ideal by example—most prominently in Whitman

 

 

“The education we receive: lessons in reception from emerson and cavell” Elizabeth Lynn, Teachers college record 96.2 9winter 1994)

Note that it focuses on the art of reception that she sees in

philosophers, indicating that their “philosophies of education” have relevance for the issue today of how to relate, how to have a common context in a pluralistic world

 

242: in focusing on emerson the radical individualist, we misread ‘one of the foremost philosophers of education in our history”

Sees his familiar poetics of resistance in service of a poetics of reception.

243: education a lifelong process of receiving the deeper set of relations—beneath the conventional

Cites ‘the School’ (1838) as his most deliberate account of ed. Philosophy

 

Points out the he equates spirit and education; and paradox that it is through the eduction in things/local that we get more universal information of soul (243)

 

245: intuition: the key is nearness, relation; not identity [thus metonymy, not metaphor]

 

But thus far, if education is inuition, above our wills—no sense of what schooling is for. Does this imply that all schooling is obstruction?

 

246: turns to that with focus on ‘secondary teachers’—the need to have help in the soul’s process of going forward, not fixing on the attachments (helping in the process of detachment)—thus education needs to remind us of this process/method?

As in: the need to learn metonymy.: ‘threads of connection’ (247)

Idolatry (fixing) vs. lifelong education

 

250: key understanding in emerson—seeing the world symbolically means it reverses common educational view: the world reads us; and we need to receive its reading (its relation already to us—we are related to what we would know) by reading poetically.

 

What this means it seems is what we might call reading metonymically [defined in Poetry and Imagination]. The emphasis defines relationship not as ‘poles of identity or difference’ but relational context

 

[from this, can build argument that we need to revise the conventional view of poetry and tradition and its value for learning, that we might claim to receive from emerson and his views of shakespeare, etc. but it is a limited (non-metonmymic) reading of emerson.

That this idea of reading poetically is a key to his view of education, that begins at the beginning view his view of nature’s literacy.

Think of how this view of reception is very different from the uses put by Arnold and william bennett, etc: where reception is conservative, is fixing, is re-metaphorized.

[does this mean I need to go back to the sections on poetry and language and re-cover the metonymy from the metaphor?]

 

Cavell

251: most important in bringing emerson’s thought into educational arena

[thus, can see that a view of emerson’s educational philosophy must deal, or benefits from, views of his most faithful reader.]

 

254: his theory of moral perfectionism.

Fundamentally democratic (unlike platonic ideal); our ideal glimpse indirectly through words nad actions of others.

Thus philosophy is the encounter with those words and actions, those texts

Recognition rather than projection

 

256: for C and E—the process of reading is a process of making connections, inhabiting the possible world for a while in the words, not permanent

[as with emerson’s view of ‘home’]

In the act of reading we are read

For C this is ‘philosophy’; for E it is reading/seeing poetically

 

Second part (257): from this textual encounter, develop a context of associations for reflection, affirmation and if necessary, abandonment.

 

258: can this be put into classroom practice.

Notes that Cavell doesn’t deal with issue; doesn’t indicate whether emerson deals with the practical of it (doesn’t note the lectures and essays where he takes up classroom practice, etc—something to build upon)

Suggests the opportunity to use this in class: to gather around a common text

 

259: a poetic pedagogy. Approaching a text poetically—making connections from experience

[need to elaborate how different this is from the usual connotations of poetic reading. Precisely what emerson is concerned about—the avoidance of personal experience; his redefintion of scholar.

In schools today, the poetic is the conventional. It would thus help to look more into the historical contexts of emerson’s discussions of education—see in his critique of institution and convention the basis for a practice—when combined with this philosophy of poetic pedagogy.

 

Notes, in reference to Graff, this conventionalizing/cannonical sense of poetry in academics tday: ‘poetolatry’

 

[she doesn’t bring in emerson on this very concern of poetolatry with shakespeare, etc; he shares concern with Graff]

 

Her final assertion [can see how important emerson can be for a re-thinking of educational purpose]

We are in a world of difference (again, metaphor); but need to also acknowledge a common world, an education that encourages us to seek relations.

 

[cavell: themes out of school; graff:

 

 

Poirier, Renewal of Literature. Chapter 1: The Question of Genius.

Keys:

p. 67—the need to take emerson seriously on the issue of his paradoxical or unconventional view of genius (and its implications—eg, the disappearance of hamlet)

Would connect this to how cavell reads the problem of emerson’s philosophical legacy ; and extend this to Emerson on education: need to take him seriously in his views on learning that consistently resist the conventions of learning/schooling.

And would extend from Poirier as from Cavell the understanding that this resistance takes place in language and is evident in his sentences

70: observes the emersonian tendency for his sentences to perform the kind of postponement and elusiveness of genius he discusses: the workings of genius, rather than the works.

 

Think of how to tie this to education: methods and writings and teachings that are not works, but wokings.

Linked to ‘convertibility’ of language [cf Genius, manners, customs lecture]

 

 

 

 

 

Sacks, Understanding Emerson: The ‘American Scholar’ and his struggle for self-reliance.

Keys: sees American scholar address (and the struggle emerson overcomes in making it) as defining moment in emerson.

Emphasizes the personal story: emerson’s insecurity and anxiety between ideal of self-reliance and interest in becoming famous; also the historical context: emerson’s revolutionary challenge to Harvard and the conventions of the college academic environment

20: revolutionary vision of his oration

[today that is misthought, following holmes, as declaration of independence for culture. But sacks helps show it is revolution in thinking, specifically in context of challenge to harvard and unitarianism, emerging from emerson’s struggle within.

21: his ‘inner conflict’

 

Can point to this—and view that AS is not well understood—and sense that this most important of academic discussions is or has been misunderstood in part by not understanding the historical and personal controversy informing it. Sense that the reform aspects have been conventionalized

 

Most useful perhaps in elucidating the Harvard context of the speech

 

3: first instnace in america of academic debate intended also for public consumption.

Can use to foreground my interests in a more public audience for the education debates of today, by going back to emerson (and to an academic debate in our heritage)

Seems as though the issue of how the debate part of this address that has been forgotten [at least in my experience, by the conventional teachers teaching it] is in fact tied up with the appeal to public consideration, and to the problems Emerson addresses in understanding words (in the struggle between conforming and reforming)

 

9: a bit of overstatement on emerson’s influence on public academic/literary debate today—though still useful to use in asking why has this influence today become largely literary, why has the educational context dropped away?

“Just as today the relative truths in the liteary canon are debated in public (for which Emerson is largely responsible)….

 

12: cites alcott’s journal: naming E ‘sham-image killer’

13: cites JMN 5:372. “Draw circles.” His understanding that will come to be circles. Suggests this is a ‘disturbing revelation’ somehting he is struggling with regarding the address (and pressure from transcendental friend). But what if this is not disturbing, but the approach he takes—to let the circles form

[think of this passage as another way to frame the proto-hypertext Emerson]

14: suggests emerson’s solution is to attack the institutio he was expected to honor.

 

16: the proposal [focus on common, in particular] was a complete break with the values of its audience.

 

17ff: responses by the audience: from admiration to gaping wonder

Alcott, holmes, Horace Mann

 

19why does emerson decide to ‘beard his alma mater

[could be dull sermon he hears month before—frost; but also could thus be tied to birth of son?]

 

28: focusing on E’s ‘philosophy of the street’—sees this as Emerson’s insight [the link between genius and popular culutre, and individual creativity] set against the conservative context of previous addresses which focuses on tradition/classics

31; in referring to ‘american scholar,’ E fully subverted an established phrase

[thus, the address in its language focuses on the conventions through language itself—sense of emerson playing at beginning with the ‘custom’ of what is expected.]

 

32; emerson goes beyond transcendental colleagues in redefining scholar—and far as any one since: questions the very essence of the academic enterprise.

I agree here and see this as a way from historical perspective to get at what the implications of AS are; recognizing it as a form of what cavell calls ‘aversive thinking’

 

Critical of Harvard’s corporate approach to education [chapter 3 thus background on harvard]

 

41: cites JMN 4: 276-7

Emerson in 1834 responding to the troubles at harvard

“A young man is to be educated & schools are built & masters brought together & gymnasium erected & scientific toys & Monitorial Systems & a College endowed with many professorships and the apparatus is so enormous and unmanageable that the e-ducation or calling out of his faculties is never accomplished…”

[so one context for Emerson’s lifelong concern for the system and apparatus of schooling is what he sees of harvard at time of AS]

 

42: emerson tied his attack on conventional language to the very heart of his message

 

43: views AS in terms of Jeremiad and revivalist preaching of time

46: radically new ideals in education…

Lost on audience but not literary offsping

[but what about his educational offspring?]

 

55: Emerson’s actions in AS (iconoclatic, attacking harvard’s narrow pedagogy) prompted by expectations of transcendentalist friends—to live up to ideals of Alcott

 

Overall: feel it provides important historical/personal context for AS and its controversy. Though from point of view of the educational theory that controversy may reflect, I think Sacks misses fact that such theory is implicit in all of emerson—in the journals and lectures (tends to view only the address itself as the radical statemetn) and after AS

 

86-87: response from E’s contemporary readers/listeners

Observations of his ‘loveliness’ and sweetness and of the slipperiness of his style

Is the ‘love’ of emerson thus tied to its slipperiness? [where we have to love and trust the thought, receive it above our wills? Does emerson think of love in the same way—above our will?]

89: lyceum—revolutionary educational force

 

 

[on emerson as/and teaching]

 

Merton Sealts: “The Scholar as Teacher” in Emerson on the Scholar.

Can think of this as taking ‘problem of vocation’ further, and redressing the problem of leaving teaching out of the vocation. Here sealts does that by showing extent to which the conceptions of scholar and emerson’s lecturing as scholar are throughout his career forms of teaching, inlcuding topic of education

[does not go as far historically as he might: showing that emerson is even more directly involved with his hands in the practice of teaching; can see buell taking this further then in pointing to his involvement with university and with educational reform movement; and see bicman as picking up on the implication that emerson influences dewey.

What I would say, in agreeing with the largely metaphorical view of emerson’s teaching—is suggest that as with the lecturing, there is a more practical, metonymic (hand-held?) engagement with teaching. Such that we need to think not merely as the scholar as teacher—after the fact, as another way to think of the scholar (and of the ‘not instruction, but provocation’ emerson entails)—but perhaps the teacher as scholar

What’s the difference? Whatever it is (call it metonymy over metaphor), I think it has allowed us to forget not just emerson as a teacher, but the teachings on teaching. So I want to emphasize, further bring out—e-ducate—the implications and understanding in sealts and buell, for teachers, that something like the american scholar should be viewed as a declaration of educational independence, a founding text for teachers, certainly for language educators.

 

267: the scholar as teacher means that emerson, in focusing on scholar, is helping people to reach the inspiration and self-possession that is, in effect, the “substance of a liberal education.”

268: turns to focus on fact that emerson, though he may have desired a university post, turned to teaching, “inspiring and provoking” in his lecturing and writing.

 

274: but this view of the ‘scholar’s teaching’ is given what I see as more of a practical context in education. Recognizes that emerson’s lectures included focus on learning and teaching.

Teachings that ‘inspire’ not just whitman or thoreau “but also anticipated the teachings of John Dewey”

 

275: argues the teaching and thinking about education—essentially religious in character.

Goes on to conlcude with implications then for why this is central to emerson thought

(‘religion and learning spring from a common source’), but also why it might become a problem for (as I see it, or as buell and others) hard to formalize as pedagogy.

1]character teachers over our heads—thus tapping into the view of reception, and learning as uncanny in some form—in any even resistant to standardizing

2]’I have no school’—working with own hands, towards the view of anti-mentoring.

 

I would argue that it is a poverty of our education, and our imagination, that today (as in emerson’s time) we must think of the options as polarities: either you are independent and work with your own hands, or you have a school system that must conflict.

The ‘hands’ are on emerson’s mind from the beginning, and in very specific contexts for education (think of the passage where he contrasts the coldness of education with thoreau building with his hands)

But working with hands within education is possible: cf dewey; or go back to understanding what emerson means by ‘learning metonymy’ (which is not anti-scholastic or anti-poetic or even anti-tradition; only a way of thinking differently about reproducing learning.)

 

Buell, Emerson

Final chapter: Emerson as anti-mentor

 

292: the tradition of dismissing emerson begins with emerson himself (as whitman notes)

This sets up a fascinating case study particularly for “iconoclasm toward pedagogical and cultural authority”

 

293: further notes that because of this interest in self-reliance (resistnace) we “overlook the extent to which pedagogoy itself interested him”

Thus: active in school and unviersity projects; pioneer in adult education (lyceum movement); focus on ‘scholar’ as teacher as well as student; understanding transcendentalsim as much an educational reform movement. [context: alcott, peabody, fuller: educational experimenters who draw e in.

 

Self-reliance as pedagogical ethic

 

294: notes image of romantic child/wordsworthian theory of birth

Theory of education from this: active intelligence

[emerson’s interest in children]

 

Re-looks at case of emerson-thoreau: instance of anti-mentorship

 

305: one key for E is mutuality

[notes that this view of mutual learning/influence should be recognzied in academia, but isn’t applied to studies of emerson—and a duplicity of theory vs practice emerson himself partakes in

306: E’s great man is impressionable

 

309-310: Emerson’s context

Grows up/educated in ‘largely drill’ formal education but also lived in ‘educational ferment

“pedagogical innovation was part of Emerson’s daily experience: alcott, lyceum, converstaions, etc..

This ferment and innovation (the history emerson is living and reading and incorporating into his writing/thinking) needs to be brought out

 

AT same time, see that his anti-authoritarian model of teaching/learning—presumably informed by his history—is not as apparent in the writing: or, not analyzed as much as described, performed.

312: ‘antisystematic kind of writing

 

319: a measure of emerson’s popularity [even though disappearing from public memory would follow logically from his own theory]

“Babies are still being named after Emerson…Emerson is still required reading in thousands of college and school programs..”

This is where I step in to focus on the recognition that the name is popular (canonical)a nd the texts required—but nothing of the pedagogical theory.

[might not this be a species of the problem—that anti-mentoring, the spirit of the reading, is neglected over the letter of the text.

Buell here gives us to think that this is an emersonian problem

 

332: cites late lecture ‘the rule of life”

Too often attach ourselves fondly to our teachers

 

Paradox key to his thinking: truth is transpersonal yet knowable only by independent individuals; statement of how not to learn from mentors

 

Talks with Emerson, Charles J. Woodbury. London: Kegan Paul, 1890 (reprint, Folcroft, 1974.)

From conversations in 1865 in Willimastown where emerson went to lecture.

Counsel on writing

23: “Expression is the main fight. Search unweariedly for that which is exact. Do not be dissuaded. You say, know words etymologically. Yes, pull them apart; see how they are made; and use them only where they fit. Avoid adjectives. Let the noun do the work. The adjective introduces sound, gives an unexpected turn, and so often mars with an unintentional false note. Most fallacies are fallacies of language. Definitions save a deal of debate.

Neither concern yourself about consistency. The moment you putty and plaster your expressions to make them hand together, you have begun a weakening process. [24] Take it for granted that truths will harmonize; and as for the falsities and mistakes, they will speedily die of themselves. If you must be contradictory, let it be clean and sharp as the two blades of scissors meet.”

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Edward Woodberry. New York: Macmillan, 1907.

[brief mention of his school teaching, emphasizes his distaste as part of his removal from intercourse with the world.

21: “Emerson had no personal intercourse with this Boston world, just as he had not come near to his professors at college. He was only one of the community who sat under the lights of the pulpit, an ambitious schoolboy of eightenn, with humble and unobserved business of his own. He assisted William in his school at his mother’s house. He had acquired some slight experience in teaching at his clerical uncle’s school in vacations, where his pupils were raw boys of his own age; and he cordially hated it. He was hardly better pleased with the task of instructing the fashionable young ladies, also of not uneven age with his own, who came to his brother to finish their education. He was timid about his French; he detested mathematics; and he was vexed by youthful defects. He was easily embarrassed, blushed, and had ‘no power of face,’ such as he especially admired in Edward; his cheeks, he long complained, were tell-tales against his interests and dignity. The young ladies found means of confusion, and he had never lived with girls; when they became impossible, he would send them to his mother’s room to study. These were trifles. The young schoolmaster, in the serious part of his task, did by teaching as he had done by his college work; he tried to do his duty, but it was against the grain. ‘Better tug at the oar,’ he writes toward the close of the year, ‘dig the [22] mine, or saw wood; better sow hemp or hang with it than sow the seeds of instruction.’ But he was soon brokern to the harness, and showed sufficient capacity to be left in charge of the school while William went for an absence of two years to Gottingen to study for the ministry.”

 

So, follows the narrative that even the prep for the ministry is against the grain—that the seeds being planted in this resistance to ‘vocation’ will flower in his calling as a scholar.

 

 

Joel Porte, Representative Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson in His Time

NY: Oxford, 1979.

The book with “essaying to be” as chapter.

I like his initial emphasis on process.

Xii: “Emerson’s career, in fact, is one of the best examples we have of the American literary character in the process, perpetually, of defining and redefining itself. It is utterly appropriate that Emerson’s preferred mode of expression should have turned out to be the essay—that tentative and fragmentary record of the mind in search of its meaning.”

 

Also example of neglect of teaching.

His biographical headnote for 1803-1836 jumps from graduation at harvard to divinity school: no mention of teaching.

 

Our Preposterous Use of Literature: Emerson and the Nature of Reading, T.S. McMillin (U Illinois P, 2000)

Focuses on how emerson, “the apothegmatic and appropriated Emerson” (41) is used especially by self-help and business; thus denying the complexity of emerson’s text and the interpretive/reading practice

‘gai science” [from Poetry and Imagination}: mobile reading

 

Veritas: Harvard College and the American Experience, Andrew Schlesinger

Interesting that Emerson figures in the history, a prominent name. But no mention of either American Scholar or Divinity address; also no specific focus on Emerson as overseer and role in the elective system reform.

 

On Education: Articles on Educational Theory and Pedagogy, and Writings for Children from “The Age of Gold”. Jose Marti; ed. By Philip S. Foner [NY: monthly review press]

Latin American writer/poet—greatly influenced by Emerson and others. Here the influence from education can be drawn through his general interest in Emerson, and specific interest in Alcott (an essay on him; has literary critical essay on Emerson in another volume) 1853-1895, Cuban

From “Bronson Alcott”: “What kind of schools are these where only the intelligence is trained? Let the teacher place himself on equal terms with his pupil, and man be in friendly cooperation with his fellow creature, and may they learn in strolls through the countryside the soul of botany which is no different than the universal, and by studying the house plants and animals and the celestial phenomena confirm the identity of creation.”(49)

 

Lectures on Education, Horace Mann. Boston: Ide and Dutton, 1855 [reprint, Arno Press, 1969]

 

Lecture 1, 1837, “Means and Objects of Common School Education”; give to conventions in fall 1837, as established by the creation of the Mass Board of educatin in april 1837.

11: “The object of the Board is, by extensive correspondence, by personal interviews, by the development and discussion of principles, to collect such information, on the great subject of Education, as now lies scattered, buried and dormant; and after digesting, and, as far as possible, systematizing and perfecting it, to send it forth again to the extremest borders of the State; –so that all improvements which are local, may be enlarged into universal; that what is not transitory and evanescent, may be established in permanency; and that correct views, on this all-important subject, may be multiplied by the number of minds capable of understanding them.”

 

His interest—in this systematizing: having uniformity of methods for the sake of communicating them, but also (in case of books and language, control)

18: “In the first place, the best methods should be well ascertained; in the second, they should be universally diffused.”

19: “There is no common, superintending power over them”

20: “a common channel for receiving and for disseminating information”

[echoes of emerson’s over-soul—but Mann has in mind a superintendent that systematizes emerson’s sense of one soul common to all]

27: “The standards, in spelling, pronunciation, and writing; in rules of grammar and in processes in arithmetic, are as various as the books”

 

Other interests

Interest in school site and ventillation of school room [kinds of things alcott will attend to]

28: focus on eye, not just ear (presumably recitation)

Recommends “the use of some simple apparatus, so as to emply the eye, more than the ear, in the acquisitions of knowledge”

[almost sounds emersonian in this]

29: “Ideas or impressions acquired through vision are long-lived. Those acquired through the agency of the other senses often die young. Hence, the immeasurable superiority of this organ is founded in Nature. There is a fund of truth in the old saying, that ‘seeing is believing’.”

 

Main concern seems to be that unlike other areas where cultivation is the focus, education has no method, things left to chance. So, wants a method that can be more universal [returns again to the analogy with mechanics—can think of mann as going in the opposite direction of emerson’s divided hand fable?]

37:”School studies ought to be so arranged as to promot a harmonious development of the faculties. In despotic Prussia, a special science is cultivated, under the name of methodik, the scope of which is to arrange and adapt studies, so as to meet the wants and exercise the powers of the opening mind. In free America, we have not the name; indeed, we can scarcely be said to have the idea. Surely, the farmer, the gardner, the florist, who have established rules for cultivatin every species of grain, and fruit, and flower, cannot dout, that, in the unfolding and expanding of the young mind, some processes will be congenial, others fatal… [38] “Indeed, can you name any business, avocation, profession, or employment, whatever,–even to the making of hobnails or wooden skewers,–where chance, ignorance, or accident, is ever rewarded with a perfect product? But in no calling is there such a diversity as in eduation,–diversity in principles, diversity in the application of those principles.”

 

To be fair, one of the accidents/bad methods he has in mind is drill without engagement

41: “Curiosity, which is the hunger and thirst of the mind, is forever cheated and balked; for nothing but a real idea can give real, true, intellectual gratification. A habit, too, is inevitably formed of reciting, without thinking.”

 

Lecture 2, 1838: “Special Preparation, a pre-requisit to teaching”

Focus on teacher education; concludes with urgin institution of Normal Schools

95: “Unfortunately, educating amongst us, at present, consists too much in telling, not in training, on the part of parents and teachers; and, of course, in hearing, not in doing, on the part of children and pupils. The balcksmith’s right arm, the philosopher’s intellect, the philanthropist’s benevolence, all grow and strengthen according to this law of exercise.”

 

 

Essays on Education, Amos Bronson Alcott. Ed. Walter Harding. Gainesville, Florida: Scholars’ Facsimiles and reprints, 1960.

 

Harding’s introduction: a way to think of emerson’s neglect in education, similar to or by way of alcott’s

Emphasizing the influence of Alcott on American public education, though influence on Emerson, Thoreau, Dewy, William Torrey Harris.

Vii: “Yet, despit his unquestionable importance in American education, Bronson Alcott has been almost completely forgotten by modern historians of education.”

 

Includes Alcott’s “Superintendent’s Report of the Concord Schools” for 1860, 61, 62

Shows that Emerson participated in the end of year Exhibitions, also was invited to lecture on books and reading to the students.

Alcott also had project of “Concord Atlas’, idea for a text book on the local/natural history that Thoreau would develop.

 

See here familiar ideas from Alcott’s earlier views: focus on conversation, on words—not grammar

158 (from 1861 report): “Still we are wont to associate college acquirements, books, erudition, with the office of teahcing, and to consider learning as the teacher’s chief qualification. It is a sad mistake, and the schools have been the suferers for it. Books were thoughts first, their contents the results of thinking, they should be baits for thought and study. We need minds whose thoughts are the substance and soul of books;… can dissolve the book and show its contents outside of its covers…to pour from a glwing mind a flood of light over the page, and create the subject anew before their eyes, inspiring them with the soul of creation. We want living minds to quicken and inform living minds.”

[compare to E’s view of creative reading]

 

174: descirption of the “Atlas of Concord” [with reference to Thoreau]

“a simple mod of studying nature as it lies about us here in our town”

“The natural method begins at home. And happily we have a sort of resident Surveyor-General of the town’s farms, farmers, animals, and everything else it contains,–who makes more of it than most persons with a continent at their call.”

Thus a study of geography and natural history that is informed, literally, by thoreau’s home cosmography.

175: “We must be near to nature and of simple heart, to study and learn what she can teach us. A child must view the landscape he is studying, or he gets very slight knowledge of it from the second sight his maps afford or the dry statement of his text boks. An actual view of the objects studies as far as may be, is essential.”

 

200: “Mr. Emerson has given the school a conversation on persons and books, telling lively anecdotes of both, interesting the school and offering useful hints about reading and study. He gave them some criticisms on their reading and speaking, read himself from Shakspeare, and recommended some favorite authors for their perusal”

 

To Emerson’s list of Shakspeare, Plutarch, Franklin’s Biography, Tom Brown at Rugby, Tom Brown at Oxford, Life of Socrates, etc.

Alcott adds: Emerson’s Essays and Addresses , Channing’s poems, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Whittier, Bryant, Irving.

 

From 1859-60 report

89: “This something called Grammar, and taught under that name in our schools; is a wast study, for the most part worthless. Children dislike it and avoid it if they can; very few comprehend the sense of it or find any use for it afterwards. Their teaching should being from the lips of the teacher; firs by correcting any slips of the tongue on their part, and then conforming their practice to the true standards in every one’s mind, with the aid of the dictionary and the style of the best writers. Conversations on words,–paraphrases and translations of sentences, are the natural methods of opening this study.”

90: “For composition, let a boy keep his diary, write his letters, try his hand at defining from the dictionary, and paraphrasing, and he will find ways of expressing himself simply as boys and men did befor ethe grammars were invented. Not that I would see the technical study of English Grammar entirely abandoned, but deferred to a riper age and made as real as possible to the child.””

 

I note here thus Emerson and Thoreau (as well as earlier views of Alcott) tied up in this more practical presentaiton of an actual school