Education of Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams

Henry Adams wrote a short preface to his landmark autobiography The Education of Henry Adams , which provides crucial clues at to what the book aims at . The first question mark is concerning whether it is an autobiography at all , and according to the admission of the author it is not so in the conventional sense . He tells us that the theme is education , and specifically it searches for a new mode of education that is appropriate to the age of science and mechanization . If he is telling

the story of his life , it is as if he is putting himself forward as a manikin in to expose the misfit of a garment , which here denotes traditional education . Adams wants to demonstrate to us that conventional education has not prepared him for the modern world , and this is the first aim we identify in the preface . The second , and related , aim is to show that such education did not educate ' his fathers either , despite their smug assurances that it did . The third aim is to demonstrate that all education is self-education . A student cannot ask of his teacher to provide him with an education , but only a mastery of the tools of education . A young man with a keen mind is described as a bundle of energy , but which is liable to go to waste without economical application . The teacher shows him how to use the tools , and thereby how to economize his force . Once the tools have served their purpose they must be discarded , and to demonstrate why this is so is the fourthly stated aim . If the student does not discard the baggage of his education he is liable to be burdened with inert facts , which becomes deadweight to him (Adams 379 . The fifth and final aim concerns the vitality of the manikin . To introduce the analogy of the manikin in the first place may suggest that the subject of the autobiography is not really a person at all . Whether he is or not , the manikin must be treated as a real person , for if this is not done the garment of education cannot be tested on the manikin at all . What Adams is really saying is that , although we should distrust the I ' of the autobiography , because it is a pretentious and largely fictional being we should empathize to an extent , because autobiography is bound to contain a measure of truth

Because he distrusted the autobiographical I , Adams finds an alternative use of the subject of his autobiography , which is as a manikin doll to test suitably of conventional education , and whether it has prepared him for the world . He states that this act of self effacement is a trend started by Jean Jacques Rousseau , whose semi-autobiographical Emile is really an educational tract . Adams is suggesting that autobiography is automatically a narrative of one 's education , and the narrator is simply the means by which this is accomplished . If this is the...