The Education of Henry Adams
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The Education of Henry Adams is at once the remarkable autobiography of Henry Adams (1838-1918), and a sharp critique of contemporary educational theory and practice. Completed in 1907, it was privately circulated until after the author's death. Following publication in 1918, it won the 1919 Pulitzer Prize. It was named the #1 book on Modern Library's 1998 list of 100 Best Nonfiction Books.
Subject
The Education examined the changing social, technological, political, and intellectual worlds occurring over the author's lifetime. Adams concluded that his traditional education failed to help him come to terms with these rapid changes, and required his self-education. The organizing thread of the book is how the "proper" schooling of his youth, along with other things in his life, was time wasted, and resulted in his search for self-education through experiences, friendships, and reading.Two aspects set The Education apart from other autobiographies. First, it is narrated in the third person, a literary device enabling a stronger and better flowing narrative. The second aspect is its sarcastic and self-critical stance. The book is filled with humor and wit.
The Education has been criticized for failing to discuss Adams's marriage, and the illness and early death of his wife. Adams, splendidily reflective and self-critical in so many other respects, did not articulate what, if anything, he had learned from these sobering experiences. But he did, in fact, speak to his marriage in indirect ways. He lamented the fact that the memorial that he had constructed for his wife had become something of a tourist attraction. More generally he changed his outlook after her death.
Context
Henry Adams' s life story is rooted in the American political aristocracy that emerged from the American Revolution. He was the grandson of the American President John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of President and Founding Father John Adams. His father, Charles Francis Adams, had served as ambassador to the United Kingdom during the American Civil War, and had been elected to the United States Senate. His brother Brooks Adams was also a historian and social critic of note. Henry Adams had received the finest formal education available in America, enjoying many other advantages as well. It is this social context that makes The Education so important. Rather than take advantage of his patrician name and other advantages, he instead sized up what had been handed to him on a silver platter, and deemed it a failure. Being given the trappings of success did not mean much to an individualist such as Adams. He instead sought to learn things himself. :)Assessment
The Education is an important work of American literary nonfiction, along with Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, and the journals of Lewis and Clark. It provides a penetrating glimpse into the intellectual and political life of the late 19th century United States, without being mired in apologetics, like Ulysses S. Grant's autobiography.Homeschoolers find value in the book. Adams made a strong case against the Prussian-style schooling used by American and European school systems. He advocated the self-directed approach which predominated prior to 1850, relying on discussion, reflection, and experience.
References
- Editions of The Education of Henry Adams in print:
- *Penguin Classics 1995 edition: ISBN 0140445579
- *Oxford University Press 1999 edition:ISBN 0192823698
- *Mariner Books 2000 edition: ISBN 0618056661
- *Library of America 1983 collected works: ISBN 0940450127 (includes Democracy, Esther, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres,and The Education of Henry Adams)
- [Free eBook: The Education of Henry Adams] at Project Gutenberg
- *Also available online from the University of Virginia [American Studies Hypertext project].
Rowe, John Carlos, ed., 1996. New Essays on The Education of Henry Adams. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521445736. These essays help place The Education in its historical context, particularly in terms of early 20th century attitudes toward education, gender, and U.S. foreign policy.
Quotations
- Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
- The Ego has ... become a manikin on which the toilet of education is to be draped in order to show the fit or misfit of the clothes. The object of study is the garment, not the figure.
- Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.
- Practical politics consists of ignoring facts.
- No mind is so well balanced as to bear the strain of seizing unlimited force without habit or knowledge of it; and finding it disputed with him by hungry packs of wolves and hounds whose lives depend on snatching the carrion.
- Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
- From cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity through multiplicity, has always been, and must always be, the task of education, as it is the moral of religion, philosophy, science, art, politics and economy; but a boy's will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame.
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