CHAPTER 3

WHAT SCHOOLING DOES TO TEACHERS

Elizabeth, Mary and Sophia Peabody were sisters from Massachusetts, all born in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Their stories, if you don’t know them already, are incredible.1 I will introduce these sisters in just a moment, but before I do, let me remind you what this chapter is about. In Chapter 2, we saw the world of teachers as through a glass darkly. Framed by Horace Mann’s injunctions of compulsory school attendance and affectionately authoritative relations with teachers­—not to mention the increasing isolation of children from contact with the everyday adult world—we saw the way that the child’s desire for intimacy and belonging can get warped within the schooling context. Teachers did not come out looking particularly good from all of this. The odds, as I tried to stress again and again, are stacked strongly against them. In this chapter, we will try to gain a clearer understanding of the position of the teacher by focusing on their experiences. Leaving Horace Mann, we will instead focus on his second wife, the equally brilliant and influential Mary Peabody Mann. Mary’s biographical thread will be our gateway into the world of the teacher. Having explored what compulsory schooling does to children in the last chapter, our overall task in the chapter will be to explore what exactly it is that compulsory schooling does to teachers. My conclusion, I’m sure, will not surprise you: teaching in American schools comes with great risks to the teacher’s psychic health. For if being a good teacher means being attuned to the desires and emotions of kids, it perhaps even more so means being attuned to one’s own desires and emotions. Absent that attunement, teachers risk playing out their own emotional lives on the canvas of their students—in ways that stunt everyone’s possibilities for personal growth and psychic integration. Returning to the main thread, then, let us ask: who were the Peabody sisters? Put simply, they were intelligent women who saw teaching as an opportunity to continue their own education and to do some good in the world. They allow us to see the rewards and challenges that women faced as they considered a career in teaching. To this I would add: they help today’s teachers in thinking through why one might or might not pursue a career in teaching in the first place. Elizabeth Peabody, the oldest of the three sisters, was one of the great minds of the nineteenth century. Friend to the “Concord Quartet” of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne and Alcott, she was particularly close to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Indeed, he turned to her to help keep afloat the short-lived journal of the Transcendentalists,

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The Dial. In the pages of this publication, Elizabeth published the first-ever English translation of a Buddhist text, the Lotus Sutra. Elizabeth was forever seeking intellectual outlets that would fit with the expectations for a single woman in nineteenth-century Massachusetts. She opened and successfully ran a bookstore in Boston, for example: the West Street Bookstore. This store would have been one of the few places at the time for the general public to obtain books from continental Europe. This store, a gathering place for Transcendental thinkers, was a hub of intellectual activity. The Parisian café of its day. Over the course of her life, she did plenty of teaching, in Maine and in Massachusetts. Of particular note in her early career was her work at the Temple School in Boston, where she assisted Bronson Alcott in his pedagogical experiments. Based on these experiences, Elizabeth published Record of a School, outlining the progressive nature of the education taking place there, so famed in its time for its beauty, light and spaciousness. In her later life, Elizabeth became an early advocate for the formal education of young children. In 1860, at over fifty years of age, she opened her kindergarten— one of the first of its kind on American soil. For the rest of her life, she wrote about and promoted the idea of a classroom space that would help quite young children realize their inherent goodness and talent. She was a pioneer of an institution that is now an accepted facet of American life. Sophia was the youngest of the three sisters. She is most famous as the wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom she married at Elizabeth’s bookstore in the summer of 1842. Yet both before and after their union, Sophia produced drawings and paintings that demonstrated her own artistic talents—including illustrations for one of Hawthorne’s published editions of Twice Told Tales. She also published journals and notebooks on her travels. Not a teacher in any conventional sense, yet given her talents, I would not fain leave her out. This, then, brings us to Mary, the middle of the three sisters. We have already met her in Chapter 1, as she would eventually become the second wife to Horace Mann. Mary was the quiet and unassuming sister, forever in the shadow of Elizabeth. Yet her own accomplishments are hardly less impressive. Throughout her early life, she assisted Elizabeth in her teaching ventures in Maine and Massachusetts. Mary, too, spent time with Bronson Alcott at the Temple School. In the latter 1830s, she established her own school in the family home in Salem. She started to write and, over the course of her life, published on a variety of topics— from botany to diet to the education of young children. She also published a novel. Mary had first met Horace Mann in the early 1830s, when they were both staying at the same boarding house. As their relationship developed, Mary began to assist Horace in his duties as the Secretary of the State Board of Education, all the while maintaining her school. Mary and Horace were wed in 1843, and as we saw in the last chapter, she accompanied her new husband for a working honeymoon in Europe.

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