The Education of Henry Adams

I've been meaning to read The Education of Henry Adams for a long time, and I've finally waded in. I don't think it's going to go very quickly, but I think I'll be glad I've read it.

Henry Adams was the grandson of John Quincy Adams and the great-grandson of John Adams. He grew up in what he calls an "18th century" Boston, one that still lived in the atmosphere of the Boston Tea Party. As I read, I am amazed that how many influential streams branch out of the Boston of that time (Longfellow, Emerson, Webster, Horace Mann, etc.), and how many seem to have been personally acquainted with the Adams family. What a way to grow up! Yet I gather by the tone of the book that Adams felt that his childhood prepared him poorly for his life, as he looked back on it in the early 20th century.

Was he right? I can't tell, at least not yet. In one early passage, he expresses surprise at the impotence of the Boston Unitarianism in which he was raised. The atmosphere in which he grew up was not only devoid of strong theology, but also of interest in philosophy. Only literature and politics remained worth discussing. Through his eyes, one gets a picture of an American city which has thrown off what the Old World had to offer, but doesn't know how to embrace the new, either. I guess I'll find out more as I read.

In the second chapter Henry Adams gives an appraisal of his schoolboy education. That's why I'm posting about the book--because this passage interested me. Although he says "the boy" throughout this quote as though he means it generally, it soon becomes evident that he's talking about himself in particular:

Home influences alone never saved a New England boy from ruin, though sometimes they may have helped to ruin him; and the influences outside of home were negative. If school helped, it was only by reaction. The dislike of school was so strong as to be a positive gain. The passionate hatred of school methods was almost a method in itself. Yet the dayschool of that time was respectable, and the boy had nothing to complain of. In fact, he never complained. He hated it because he was here with a crowd of other boys and compelled to learn by memory a quantity of things that did not amuse him. He memory was slow, and the effort painful. For him to conceive that his memory could compete for school prizes with machines of two or three times its power, was to prove himself wanting not only in memory, but flagrantly in mind. He thought his mind a good enough machine, if it were given time to act, but it acted wrong if hurried. Schoolmasters never gave time.

In any and all its forms, the boy detested school, and the prejudice became deeper with years. He always reckoned his school days, from ten to sixteen years old, as time thrown away. Perhaps his needs turned out to be exceptional, but his existence was exceptional. For success in the life imposed on him he needed, as afterwards appeared, the facile use of only four tools: Mathematics, French, German and Spanish. With these, he could master in very short time any special branch of inquiry, and feel at home in any society. Latin and Greek, he could, with the help of the modern languages, learn more completely by the intelligent work of six weeks than in the six years he spent on them at school...

...Indeed, had his father kept the boy at home, and given him half an hour's direction very day, he would have done more for him than school ever could do for them. Of course, school-taught men and boys looked down on home-bred boys, and rather prided themselves on their own ignorance, but the man of sixty can generally see what he needed in life, and in Henry Adams's opinion it was not school.

Most school experience was bad. Boy associations at fifteen were worse than none. [Here he names many amusements common at the time.] From none of these amusements could the boy learn anything likely to be of use to him in the world. Books remained as in the eighteenth century, the source of life, and as they came out--Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer, Tennyson, Macaulay, Carlyle, and the rest---they were devoured; but as far as happiness went, the happiest hours of the boy's education were passed in summer lying on a musty heap of Congressional Dcouments in the old farmhouse at Quincy, reading "Quentin Durward," "Ivanhoe," and "The Talisman," and raiding the garden at intervals for peaches and pears. On the whole he learned most then.

Considering how generally negative Adams is, I'm not sure we should take his word as wisdom, but as a firsthand description of the extraordinary life to which he was born, the Education is very interesting reading.