ADAMS: The Education of Henry Adams (Quincy)
Education begins at home.
So just like all children that’s where Henry Adams first started
learning about life. He came to the
conclusion that even though we all share the same world “everyone must bear his
own universe.” We all see the same world
but react to it very differently. That
was precisely Burke’s point in his Reflections on the Revolution in France when he
said we all have “prejudices.” Adams summed up his own prejudices this way: “He seemed
to himself quite normal, and… whatever was peculiar about him was education,
not character…” What kind of education
did he get?
Adams says “This problem of
education, started in 1838, went on for three years, while the baby (Adams
himself) grew, like other babies, unconsciously, as a vegetable, the outside
world working as it never had worked before, to get his new universe ready for
him.” Henry Adams started out pretty
much “as a vegetable” but would grow up to develop his own unique universe; not
mine, not yours, but his own. “He was
three years old when he took this earliest step in education; a lesson of
color.” His earliest memory was color:
yellow sunlight on the kitchen floor. The “vegetable” of a baby was acquiring animal
instincts and “…the second followed soon; a lesson of taste… hunger must have
been stronger than any other pleasure or pain… a baked apple.” Seeing and tasting, touching and hearing and
smelling; these senses form the core of all education. This is how ideas first begin to form in our
minds. As we grow and continue to learn
we begin to distinguish between things and make judgments; this is good, that’s
bad. And Henry Adams certainly made
strong judgments (again we find Burke’s prejudices). “Town was restraint, law, unity. Country, only seven miles away, was liberty,
diversity, outlawry… winter was always the effort to live, summer was tropical
license… summer and country were always sensual living, while winter was always
compulsory learning. Summer was…nature;
winter was school.” This may not be my
opinion or yours but it was his.
And that wasn’t all. Adams said “He never could compel himself to care for
nineteenth century style. He was never
able to adopt it… because, for some remote reason, he was born an eighteenth
century child.” In Adams’
own universe he had been born in the wrong century and he pondered “What could
become of such a child of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when he
should wake up and find himself required to play the game of the twentieth?” At the outset of this book Adams
wants us to think about the kind of education we need to have if we want to
play the game of life. A good family
life at home is a good start. But that’s
not enough. In Adams
case “…though three or four vigorous brothers and sisters, with the best will,
were not enough to crush any child, everyone else conspired toward an education
which he hated.” Adams
knew what he did not like, school. And
he describes what a boy like him would do if left to himself: “He hung about
the library; handled the books; deranged the papers; ransacked the drawers;
searched the old purses and pocketbooks for foreign coins; drew the sword-cane;
snapped the travelling pistols; upset everything in the corners…” Boys will be boys. But boys grow up to be men. The question is: what kind of man? For Henry Adams “Already at ten years old,
the boy found himself standing face to face with a dilemma that might have
puzzled an early Christian. What was
he? Where was he going? …He could under no circumstances have guessed
what the next fifty years had in store, and no one could teach him…” Adams has to
learn on his own. And so his education
begins…
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