Today, our guest, Paul Cooke, Director of the
Institute at the University of Houston, talks
about a remarkable teacher -- and father. The
University presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
Bronson Alcott went to school at a
Connecticut crossroads in a small, bare room. His
schoolmaster did nothing to stir him to think or to
be curious. When Bronson became too useful on the
family farm, his formal schooling ended. The year
was 1812. He was thirteen. Still wanting to learn,
he vowed to educate himself and read every book in
the neighborhood he could find.
As he grew older he learned that the greatest thing
he had learned in his first school was how children
should not be taught. Alcott began the struggle of
defying public opinion about how schools should
Self-taught and not yet 24 years old, he took his
first teaching job and soon came to see "teaching
as the most crucial of all professions."
In 1827, after he had opened his own school, an
article in the Boston papers praised it as perhaps
"the best common school in the United States." But
others criticized it because it wasn't stressing
memorization of facts and straightforward study of
practical information. Parents took their children
out, and the school closed.
A second school failed, and then he started a
third. Twenty students came on the first day to a
room arranged to be uplifting. In the corners were
pedestals with busts of Socrates, Shakespeare, and
Milton. Students were arranged in a semi-circle,
and Alcott began the day by asking them what they
thought was the purpose of school. He talked to
them about his duties as a teacher and asked them
to talk of their duties as students. Dialogues with
students were the rule.
Bronson Alcott's Temple School
pictured in his
Record Of Conversations on the Gospel,
He never let class activity turn into routine. Even
the way spelling lessons were done changed from day
to day. One spelling word on an occasion was
"yawn," and he let students tell funny and
embarrassing anecdotes about yawning. He often tied
this work with words to issues having to do with
the building of character.
But parents again took their children out, and the
school closed. Alcott was too untraditional.
discouragement after this third failure was great,
and he was deeply troubled. His old friends Emerson
and Thoreau comforted and
encouraged him over a period of months, helping him
return to sound health. Bronson Alcott's four
children encouraged him, too, as his famous
daughter told the world years later. Lousia May Alcott, the author of
Little Women, in her "Recollections of My
My father's school was the only one I ever went
to, and when this was broken up because he
introduced methods now all the fashion, our lessons
went on at home, for he was always sure of four
little pupils who firmly believed in their
Wanting to change American schools for the better,
Bronson Alcott struggled with disappointment. His
daughter, Louisa May, saw plainly that her father
was simply ahead of his time -- the fate of many a
I'm Paul Cooke at the University of Houston, where
we're interested in the way inventive minds work.
Duck, L., Understanding American Education: Its
Past, Practices, and Promise. Burke, VA:
Chatelaine Press, 1996, Chapter 6.
Shepard, O., Pedlar's Progress: The Life of
Bronson Alcott. New York: Greenwood Press,
Alcott, L. M., Louisa May Alcott: An Intimate
Anthology. (New York Public Library
Collector's Edition) New York: Doubleday, 1997,
"Recollections of My Childhood," pp. 3-11.
Paul Cooke, author of Thomas Hobbes and
Christianity (1996), has been associated with
the University of Houston Honors College since
1993, teaching such courses as "Slavery and Its
Consequences in America," and "Jesus, Socrates, and
Justice." Since late 1998, he has served as the
Director of the Houston Teachers
Institute, a partnership between the University
and the Houston Independent School District. The
Institute was established under the guidance of the
Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute as part of a
national initiative to strengthen classroom
teaching in U.S. public schools.
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-2002 by John H.