(Amos) Bronson Alcott

Teacher, mystic, and writer, born near Wolcott, Connecticut, USA. The father of Louisa May Alcott, he was largely self-educated and became an itinerant teacher (1823–33) before settling in Boston to found his own school (1834). By this time he was a mystic and transcendentalist, and his radical ideas of educating children, plus his acceptance of a black girl as a pupil, led to the failure of his school (1839). He settled in Concord, MD, but after a trip to England (1842), where a school (Alcott House) based on his theories had been set up, he returned to establish a utopian community, Fruitlands, outside Boston (1844). Devoted to vegetarianism as well as to high thinking, the community failed within eight months. He took his family back to Concord, and although he moved around to teach and lecture, he spent most of the rest of his life there, the centre of the transcendentalists. He was appointed superintendent of schools in Concord (1857), and is credited with several innovations, including the first parent–teacher association. The success of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868) gave the family financial security and allowed him to set up his Concord Summer School of Philosophy and Literature (1879). He wrote poetry, several books on his theories of education, a biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and an autobiography, but his greatest impact seems to have come through his personal presence and conversation.

Amos Bronson Alcott (November 29, 1799 - March 4, 1888) was an American teacher and writer.

Alcott was born on Spindle Hill in the town of Wolcott, New Haven County, Connecticut. The son adopted the spelling "Alcott" in his early youth.

Self-educated and early thrown upon his own resources, he began in 1814 to earn his living by working in a clock factory in Plymouth, Connecticut, and for many years after 1815 he peddled books and merchandise, chiefly in the southern states. He began teaching in Bristol, Connecticut in 1823, and subsequently conducted schools in Cheshire, Connecticut, in 1825-1827, again in Bristol in 1827-1828, in Boston, Massachusetts in 1828-1830, in Germantown, now part of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1831-1833, and in Philadelphia in 1833.

In 1830 he married Abby May, the sister of Samuel J. Alcott himself was a Garrisonian abolitionist, and pioneered the strategy of tax resistance to slavery which Thoreau made famous in Civil Disobedience. Alcott publicly debated with Thoreau the use of force and passive resistance to slavery;

In 1834 he opened the Temple School in Boston, which became famous because of his original methods. Alcott's plan was to develop self-instruction on the basis of self-analysis, with an emphasis on conversation rather than the lecture and drill which were prevalent in U.S. classrooms of the time. some of the school's conversations were published in Alcott's Conversations with Children on the Gospels. Alcott refused corporal punishment as a means of disciplining his students; As assistants in the school Alcott had two of nineteenth-century America's most talented women writers, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (who published A Record of Mr. Alcott's School in 1835) and Margaret Fuller; Alcott's methods were not well received; Finally Alcott alienated many of the remaining parents by admitting an African American child whom he then refused to expel from his classes. In 1839 the school was closed, although Alcott had won the affection of many of his pupils.

In 1840 Alcott removed to Concord, Massachusetts. The experiment quickly collapsed, and Alcott returned in 1844 to his Concord home "Hillside" (later renamed "The Wayside" by Hawthorne) near that of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Alcott removed to Boston four years later, and again back to Concord after 1857, where he and his family lived in the Orchard House until 1877.

He spoke, as opportunity offered, before the "lyceums" then common in various parts of the United States, or addressed groups of hearers as they invited him. These "conversations" as he called them, were more or less informal talks on a great range of topics, spiritual, aesthetic and practical, in which he emphasized the ideas of the school of American Transcendentalists led by Emerson, who was always his supporter and discreet admirer.

Alcott's philosophical teaching was, and is still, often thought inconsistent, hazy or abrupt. The teachings of Dr. William Ellery Channing a little before had laid the groundwork for the work of most of the Concord Transcendentalists and contributors to The Dial, of whom Alcott was one.

In his last years, his daughter, the writer Louisa May Alcott, provided for him. Alcott was gratified at being able to become the nominal, and at times the actual, head of a summer "Concord School of Philosophy and Literature", which had its first session in 1879, and in which, in a building next to his house, listeners were addressed during a part of several successive summers on many themes in philosophy, religion and letters.

Alcott's published books, all from late in his life, included Tablets (1868), Concord Days (1872), and Sonnets and Canzonets (1882).