To begin with, as this is my first posting on any blog, I must say that I am honored to join your ranks and look forward to interacting with many of you in the months and years ahead. Many thanks to Erich for his patience in setting me up and getting me on line.

My first post concerns education–what it is, what it isn’t, what it should be, and how we can make it better. My interest in this topic arises from my own “educational” experiences, in and out of the classroom, and the fact that I have two daughters of grade-school age. But the real pin that has pricked the bubble of my curiosity is “The Education of Henry Adams,” the autobiography of the great grandson of Founding Father John Adams and grandson of President John Quincy Adams. You know–for fun. 

After all, the cover of the version I have calls it “The #1 nonfiction book of the twentieth century.” Well, if you can’t trust the marketing department’s jacket copy, who can you trust? Besides, right now the top five books on the New York Times bestseller list for nonfiction include, at number 1, “An Inconvenient Book,” the latest ravings of right-wing–excuse me, I mean of course “fair and balanced”–radio personality Glenn Beck, yet another offering from former NBC News top-guy-turned-nostalgic-baby-boomer Tom Brokaw, and Eric Clapton’s autobiography. Well, except for maybe Clapton, not much to choose from. 

So over the Thanksgiving holiday I started reading this book, which I have seen cited in many American history books I’ve copyedited. At just over 500 pages it is by no means slight, and written in the style of the day (the book was published for about 100 of Adams’s friends and associates in 1906). 

Top on my list of questions about the book is its title. Adams places himself in the passive voice, a recipient of this thing called “education,” while Donald Hall begins his modern-day introduction with “Henry Adams’ education earns him a degree in irony.” I can understand the grammatical reason Hall put it that way, but I think the distinction between an education given (or forced, or coerced) onto someone is a very different animal from an education one actually chooses and claims as one’s own.

But I don’t want to belabor this point, and I didn’t read any more of Hall’s introduction. I want to come to my own conclusion about what education Adams received, or what education he siezed, and just what “education” meant to him anyway. I can’t answer these questions in one post, so I’m hoping someone out in the blogosphere will chime in and engage me on this topic.

As it turns out, “The Education” is actually a sequel of sorts. As Henry Cabot Lodge explains in his “Editor’s Preface,” the book was preceded by a book call “Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres: A History of Thirteenth Century Unity.” Adams’s idea, according to Lodge, was to chronicle the century 1150-1250 and then “from that point he proposed to fix a position for himself, which he could label ‘The Education of Henry Adams: A Study of Twentieth Century Multiplicity.’”

An ambitious title, especially since Adams died in 1912. Yet he had lived through a major transformation–the shift from farm to field, from an agrarian economy to an urban one, with all of its negative consequences: deplorable working conditions, pollution, etc. He could not have foreseen exactly how tthese hings would turn out, but he could see which way the gyre was turning: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”

Another curiosity of the book is that it is written in the third person. It’s off-putting to read an autobiography in the third person, and Adams hints at the reason for this choice in the book’s preface. Referring to Jean Jacques Rousseau’s “Confessions,” Adams writes that “as an educator, Jean Jacques was, in one respect, easily first; he erected a monument of warning against the Ego.” Adams’s capitalization of “Ego” predates Sigmund Freud’s articulation of the notion of Id, Ego, and Superego by about a decade; so while it is possible he had some notion of the theory Freud was developing, it seems like anattempt to read anything Freudian into this is stretching. I think Adams’s point is simply that he wrote the book in the third person so that he could objectively examine his life as though he were merely a character in it–but in the 100 or so pages of the book I’ve read so far, Adams sees his character/self not receiving much of an education at all.

After he acknowledges his awareness of the privileged ircumstances to which he was born–upper class, with strong political ties on many levels–he offers a catalog of the poor education he has received to date. A schoolmaster, in Adams’s eyes, was “a man employed to tell lies to little boys” and obsessed with rote memorization rather than education; at Harvard, “he got less than nothing, a result common enough in education”; and even the customary upper-class trip abroad–an opportunity, one imagines, to take part in activities frowned upon in the states (drinking, smoking, general “whoring around)–largely leaves him cold. On the trip over he learns mostly about seasickness; in London, he finds “education went backwards; in Berlin (a “poor, keen witted, provincial town, simple, dirty, uncivilized, and in most respects disgusting”) he learns mostly of “beer cellars and music-halls, and dance-rooms, smoking bad tobacco, drinking poor beer and eating sauerkraut and sausages as though he knew no better”; France (Glenn Beck would love this) “he disapproved of . . . in the lump.” Only Rome, even if it was “the most violent vice in all the world,” offers redeeming qualities–history, architecture, beauty. But all in all, the trip abroad a views mostly a failure in terms of his “education.” However, Adams saves special derision for Germany. “Even after Berlin became a nightmare,” he writes, “he [Adams] still persuaded himself that his German education was a success. He loved, or thought he loved the people, but the Germany he loved was the eighteenth-century, which the Germans were ashamed of, and destroying as fast as they could. Of the Germany to come he knew nothing. Military German was his abhorrence. . . . Germany had no confidence in itself, and no reason to feel it. She had no unity, and no reason to covet it. She never had unity.”

As he wrote these words, a teen-ager named Adolph Hitler was perhaps beginning to see Germany’s potential for unity. All which this begs the question–what, then, does education consist of? Should you receive it or seek it? And if you seek it, how do you know you are looking in the right place? 

My plan is to read the rest of the book with such questions and and thoughts in mind, reporting my findings here, and hopefully stirring some conversation about “the #1 nonfiction book of the twentieth century”–”The Education of Henry Adams.” 

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 2nd, 2007 at 10:32 pm and is filed under Education, History, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.