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| (1799-1888) |
Amos Bronson Alcott is undoubtedly less known than his daughter, Louisa May Alcott, the author of Little Women. Even in the field of philosophy, he is overshadowed by the fame of his associates, Emerson and Thoreau, who, together with Alcott, were part of the so-called Transcendentalist movement.
What we are looking at in this article is Alcott’s work as a reformer of education. Alcott himself worked as a school teacher, but we are especially interested in his theoretical work on the topic of education, and particularly on infant instruction, where the infants in question are meant to be under the age of primary school, from two to seven years. Alcott’s main principle is the time-honoured idea, familiar from Plato onwards, that education means not just external pouring of information in a person's mind, but development of propensities already nascent within the mind.
Underlying Alcott’s ideal of education is also a notion of what it means to be a human. Humans are for Alcott active beings with a twofold nature, animal and intellectual. While the aim of education is especially the development of the intellectual side of the human being, the animal side should not be ignored. This is especially true of small children, where animal nature is still stronger than intellectual nature. Like the whole human being, their animal nature is also active. Thus, Alcott concludes, the natural physical energy of children should not be bound down, but allowed to develop through playing. By letting children use their physical energy, the teacher pacifies their animal nature and creates room also for the development of the intellect.
Children seek primarily enjoyment, Alcott says. He thinks this is a perfectly natural desire, but the task of education is just to direct this desire to lasting sources of enjoyment. Still, because small children prefer very immediate forms of enjoyment, their instruction must remain at a very concrete level and leave abstract reasoning for the higher levels of education. Route memorising is to be replaced by amusing stories, pictures, music and poetry.
Alcott also endorses the idea that human beings feel a natural sympathy toward one another and are thus by nature communal animals. This implies, Alcott suggests, that the teacher should encourage the use of this natural sympathy and especially use it to build up the conscience of the children. The best way to do this, Alcott think, is that the teachers themselves become an object of children’s affection and thus serve as their role models, showing toward them the same kindness they want to awaken in them. If this succeeds, he concludes, the children become, in a proper Kantian fashion like law to themselves.
