Henry Adams on the Ends of Education

Abstract

Chapter 3 examines how the author of The Education of Henry Adams confronted the developments in party politics, immigration, and technology that he believed had fragmented American democracy at the turn of the twentieth century. Henry Adams described education as the intellectual or social pursuits whereby we find ourselves and our place among others, pursuits that require a guiding authority figure or frame. Narrating his life as a failed attempt to find himself in Washington politics, journalism, and teaching, Adams revealed how modernity had outmoded an old form of education through the authority of republican statesmen. Inspired by advancements in biology and physics, Adams looked to the sciences for a new authority through which to understand himself and the nation, leading him to life writing. Adams sought to usher in a new American better fit to modernity than he was, insisting that those who survive him would need to seek new education.