The Transcendental Schoolroom: Childhood Education and Literary Culture in Antebellum America

The Transcendental Schoolroom revisits a pivotal moment for the American school, investigating the mutually constitutive relationship between childhood education and literary culture in the first half of the nineteenth century. From 1834 to 1838, Bronson Alcott, a member of the emerging Transcendentalist circle, operated an innovative school out of Boston's Tremont Street Masonic Temple. Contemporaneous with the wider movement to systematize public education in the 1830s and 1840s, Alcott's institution introduced journaling, conversation, and the study of imaginative literature to the schoolroom. My dissertation returns in each of four chapters to the Temple School and other literary locales, investigating how Transcendentalism offers methods for fostering individualism through institutional practice and shapes the tenets of the modern English classroom. Defined by resistance to the orthodoxy of formal institutions, Transcendental literary culture, with its emphasis on the "living, spoken, answered, word," nonetheless established practices for democratic education integral to the American school's mission of public access and open dialogue. The project places Alcott's neglected Conversations with Children on the Gospels and Elizabeth Peabody's Record of a School, as well as Emerson's essays and other classic works of American literature, in conversation with nineteenth-century school architecture, school legislation, textbooks, and professional journals of education to point out confluences and dissonances between educational ideals propagated by reformers and aesthetic and cultural ideals at work in antebellum literature. In recovering the literature of education reform for the field of literary studies, I suggest that the schoolroom becomes a site, much like Thoreau's house at Walden, for Transcendentalism in practice. Locating the principles of John Dewey and other late nineteenth-century Progressive educators in antebellum literary culture, The Transcendental Schoolroom opens a dialogue between the history of education and literary studies and reveals the prominent place of our pedagogical legacy in American arts and letters.