Voting Station

Amos Bronson Alcott

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Educator

The Resume

Why he might be annoying:

    His schools were never very successful, forcing his family to live in poverty until his daughter's literary career took off.
    He founded a utopian commune, Fruitlands, that failed after seven months (1842).
    His essays for the Transcendentalist journal 'The Dial' were mocked as dense and meaningless. (Example: 'The visible world is the extremist wave of that spiritual flood, whose flux is life, whose reflux death, efflux thought, and conflux light.')
    He joined Henry David Thoreau in supporting John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry.
    He was a vegan.

Why he might not be annoying:

    Many of his educational ideas, including 'learning by encouragement' and art and music education, became standard in later classrooms.
    He founded one of the first adult education centers in America (1879).
    One of his schools failed when he admitted a black child and refused to expel him in response to protests from the parents of other students.
    He helped fugitive slaves escape on the Underground Railroad.
    He got off at least one good vegetarian zinger: When Emerson was lecturing about how barbaric cannibalism was, he observed, 'But if we are to eat meat at all, why should we not eat the best?'

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    In 2023, Out of 11 Votes: 36.36% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 7 Votes: 57.14% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 7 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2020, Out of 3 Votes: 66.67% Annoying
    In 2019, Out of 3 Votes: 66.67% Annoying
    In 2018, Out of 3 Votes: 66.67% Annoying
    In 2017, Out of 3 Votes: 66.67% Annoying
    In 2016, Out of 2 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2015, Out of 6 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2014, Out of 7 Votes: 57.14% Annoying
    In 2013, Out of 7 Votes: 57.14% Annoying
    In 2012, Out of 8 Votes: 37.50% Annoying
    In 2011, Out of 12 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2010, Out of 14 Votes: 85.71% Annoying