The Education of Henry Adams

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The Education of Henry Adams records the struggle of Bostonian Henry Adams (1838-1918), in early old age, to come to terms with the dawning 20th century, so different from the world of his youth. It is also a sharp critique of 19th century educational theory and practice. In 1907, Adams began privately circulating copies of a limited edition printed at his own expense. Commercial publication had to await its author's 1918 death, whereupon it won the 1919 Pulitzer Prize.

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The Education is much more a record of Adams's introspection than of his deeds. It is an extended meditation on the social, technological, political, and intellectual changes that occurred over Adams's lifetime. Adams concluded that his traditional education failed to help him come to terms with these rapid changes; hence his need for self-education. The organizing thread of the book is how the "proper" schooling and other aspects of his youth, was time wasted; thus his search for self-education through experiences, friendships, and reading.

Many aspects of the contemporary world emerged during the half-century between the Civil War and World War I, a half-century coinciding with Adams's adult life. An important theme of The Education is its author's bewilderment and concern at the rapid advance in science and technology over the course of his lifetime, sometimes now called Second Industrial Revolution but incarnated in his term "dynamo." The Education mentions the recent discovery of x-rays and radioactivity, and shows a familiarity with radio waves in his citation of Marconi and Branly. Adams purchased an automobile as early as 1902, in order to make better use of a summer in France researching Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. He correctly predicted that the 20th century would see even more explosive changes. Adams repeatedly laments that his formal education, grounded in the classics, history, and literature, as was then the fashion, did not give him the scientific and mathematical knowledge needed to grasp the scientific breakthroughs of the 1890s and 1900s.

Two aspects set The Education apart from the common run of autobiographies. First, it is narrated in the third person; second, it is frequently sarcastic and humorously self-critical.

The Education repeatedly mentions two long-standing friends of Adams, the scientific explorer of the Far West, Clarence King, and the American diplomat, John Milton Hay.

The Education does not discuss Adams's marriage, and the illness and 1885 suicide of his wife, Clover. Adams, splendidily reflective and self-critical in so many other ways, 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. For example, he lamented how the memorial he had constructed for his wife had become something of a tourist attraction. More generally, it is clear that his outlook changed after her death.

[edit] 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 House of Representatives. 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. But the trappings of success did not mean much to a restless individualist such as Adams. Rather than take advantage of his patrician name, he instead sized up this and other advantages and found them wanting.

[edit] 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.

The Education ranked first on the Modern Library's 1998 list of 100 Best Nonfiction Books and also was nominated as the best book of the twentieth century several years later by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

Homeschoolers and unschoolers value The Education because it makes a strong case against the regimented Prussian-style schooling used by American and European school systems. He preferred a self-directed approach of a kind that had predominated before 1850 and that relied on reading, discussion, reflection, and experience.

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[edit] References

Wikisource has original text related to this article:

The Education of Henry Adams.

A recent collection of interpretive essays is:

  • Rowe, John Carlos, ed., 1996. New Essays on The Education of Henry Adams. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-44573-6. These essays situate The Education in its historical context, especially in light of U.S. foreign policy and of views about education and gender prevailing at the time it was written.

[edit] Quotations

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
  • 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.
  • Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
  • 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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