Transcendental teaching: A reinvention of American education (Amos Bronson Alcott, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller)

Though much scholarly work has been dedicated to New England Transcendentalism over the past century, it is odd that little attention has been paid to its participants' roles as educators, a gap in scholarship that is especially hard to understand because many of the well-known participants in this movement had jobs as school teachers. This project is an attempt to fill that gap and offers a broad discussion of Amos Bronson Alcott's, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody's, Ralph Waldo Emerson's, Henry David Thoreau's, and Margaret Fuller's multifaceted interests in and concerns with American education. At the same time, it shows that each of these Transcendentalists, in their work as educators, developed very distinct pedagogies that were quite divergent from those employed in the 19th-century common schools, which were championed by lawyer turned educational reformer, Horace Mann.; This dissertation is also based on a desire to make history applicable to 21st-century academics, particularly those in English departments who have, in the last decade or two, been forced to reimagine and reinvent themselves within a university where students now view their education as simply a necessary step in the quest for a good job. The Introduction and the Conclusion to this dissertation explain how each of the chapters offers ways to envision new approaches to humanities instruction.; Lastly, as this dissertation expounds on the teaching philosophies of the Transcendentalists, it shows that pedagogical discussions can be applicable to literary studies and that the supposed line of demarcation separating them is not as distinct as many have tacitly assumed. Therefore, while I would certainly like to see my research spark the imaginations of literary historians and educators and motivate them to revisit both the Transcendentalists and modern-day pedagogical approaches, I would also like it to unmask the fallacious assumptions behind the too prevalent claims and beliefs that true literary research and, likewise, true literary scholars have no business discussing pedagogy.