Word: alcott
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...Bronson Alcott? Few U. S. memories are long enough to answer. Fifty years ago a name to conjure with, he is known now, if at all. as the father of Louisa May Alcott, best-selling author (Little Women, Little Men). It is Biographer Shepard's well-presented thesis that Bronson Alcott is one of America's almost-forgotten great men. An ably-written, authoritative book, Pedlar's Progress deserves every penny of its $5,000 prize (Little, Brown Centenary), will fit snugly on the same shelf with Van Wyck Brooks's The Flowering of New England...
...Bronson Alcott's given name was Amos Bronson Alcox. He changed it not for euphony but to scotch smirks. Born (1799) a Connecticut farmer's son, Alcott had a good old-fashioned pastoral upbringing but little school. His immortal longings were not bounded by the farm's horizon: he was determined to better not only himself but the world. At 19 he left home to find himself and make his fortune, went as a pedlar of Yankee notions into the South. The hospitable Southerners took him in, taught him manners, lent him books. Commercially, his trips were...
...schoolteacher Alcott was a heretic from the start. His innovations-all aimed at drawing out rather than cramming the pupil-drew wide and often unfavorable attention. By the time he had married and started his famed Temple School in Boston he was known as an educational revolutionary. The Ph. D.'s of the day considered him a rank incompetent. "He turned over and tumbled up and down at least a thousand of the most influential books in the world . . . yet the total result never amounted to anything in the least like erudition. His faculty for ignoring and forgetting...
Founded in boom days, the Temple School prospered only briefly. When Alcott published the Record of Conversations on the Gospels Held in Mr. Alcott's School, its theological and pedagogical heresies shocked Boston; the pupils dropped from 40 to 25, to ten, to three. Alcott shut up shop. He tried to open another school, had to close that in short order when he admitted a Negro child among the Brahmins. By this time he was $6,000 in debt...
With education in his blood, too, Alcott set out on the road once more. This time he peddled not notions but what he called Conversations- informal but high-souled colloquies of 20 or 30 people. These Conversations never degenerated into arguments; if they did, "Alcott simply took refuge in the uppermost silences...