Bronson Alcott Boston: James Munroe & Company, 1836. Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature.

In 1843 Bronson Alcott organized his own utopian commune, called "Fruit lands" for its commitment to vegetarianism. In a gentle satire on her father's idealism called "Transcendental Wild Oats," Louisa May Alcott, a year of whose childhood was spent at this short-lived commune, suggested a better name for it would have been "Apple Slump." If Emerson was the most popular prophet of cultural change, Alcott was perhaps the purest. In 1836 he opened an elementary school on Boston's Fremont Street. His idea of "teaching the children well" was devoutly Transcendentalist, doing away with physical discipline and rote memorization, helping each child discover and express the greatness already within her or him. In Conversations on the Gospels he hoped to prove not only the success of his pedagogy, but also the real value of Christianity—by showing how the hearts of children already contained the truths of the New Testament. He naively called this book, published December 23, 1836, "Volume One." Volume Two was never published. By February, 1837, the book was under attack in the Boston papers. The Courier, for example, quoted a "noted clergyman" who called Alcott's teaching method "one-third absurd, one-third blasphemous, and one-third obscene." Although Emerson wrote the paper to point out that Alcott's goal was simply "to make children think," Alcott himself was hooted in the streets and alarmed parents pulled their children out of the school, which soon closed. On the other hand, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, his assistant at the school, went on in 1860 to open the first kindergarten in America, and the kind of educational reform that Alcott believed in was reborn in the sixties—though its pedagogy was then and remains controversial.

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