American Philosophy (25 page)

Hull House opened its doors in Chicago in 1889 and immediately became a testing ground for social progressives of the nineteenth century, a place where diverse urban populations could not just live in proximity, but also cohabitate and thrive. Addams's house would turn into the intellectual and political epicenter of the Windy City. Today, activists and social workers are occasionally invited to give lectures at distinguished universities, but in the 1890s, faculty from the University of Chicago were invited to come to speak at Hull House. John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, two of the most famous members of the Chicago school of pragmatism, were regular visitors to Addams's community. Both of these men, following Plato, took education as the starting place for political reform. Education was not something that you “get,” the way one gets a diploma or a jelly doughnut. It is something you experience, a process you live through—spring training for the rest of your life. Dewey, Mead, and William James came to think of Addams's reform movement as pragmatism in action.

Hull House was built at the crossroads between theory and practice, a place where ideas could be implemented and tested by a diverse set of individuals facing common problems. Throughout the 1890s Addams led open philosophical discussions with residents of Hull House, most of them women. One of these seminars had centered on Royce's
The Religious Aspect of Philosophy.
Royce had spent his entire career talking about the need for loyal and reverent communities, but Addams worked tirelessly to actually maintain one. By the turn of the century she was widely regarded as one of the best academic sociologists in the United States, and she used sociological hypotheses to negotiate the interpersonal dynamics of Hull House. She was empirical and experimental and, above all, sensitive to the situation of her fellow community members. James, who shared this intellectual sensibility at least in principle, read Addams's first book,
Democracy and Social Ethics
, with “deep satisfaction” and claimed that “[i]t seems to me one of the great books of our time.” Dewey's
Democracy and Education
, which argued for the vital link between a free society and education, stemmed from his time at Hull House, and his
Liberalism and Social Action
was dedicated “to the memory of Jane Addams.” Dewey's daughter, Jane, was named after her.

In the fallout of my divorce I'd reached out to my friend Marilyn—who'd helped me understand Hull House—for a bit of moral support. Appropriately for someone who'd dedicated her life to reading Addams, Marilyn listened to me patiently for months, her empathy embodying Addams's belief that “sympathetic knowledge is the only way of approach to any human problem.” I whined and sniveled and went on and on about the frustrations of being alive and the inescapable hellishness of living with others. After too many days of my Sartrean bellyaching, Marilyn wrote me a little note, two quick lines that made all the difference: “Not long after my first child was born I knew in my bones that I could not die, that my daughter's life depended on my being responsible every single minute. Existential angst turned into a luxury item enjoyed by those who did not have ground-level responsibility for others' lives.” And that was the end of my whining. At first it sparked into righteous indignation but soon died down into acceptance and finally admiration. Maybe I didn't have to have kids—that still seemed like a total impossibility—but perhaps my life would be more bearable if I didn't go it alone, if I was willing to be responsible for others.

Addams's books—from
Twenty Years at Hull-House
to
Newer Ideals of Peace
—should never have been packed away and separated from the rest of the history of philosophy. Carol and I, without even saying a word to each other, packed them up and prepared to do something that the Hockings had avoided for a century—take them downstairs and put them with the rest of “Grandfather's books.”

 

I KNEW A PHOENIX

By the time we lugged the last of the books to the first floor, the sun was directly overhead, so we broke for lunch. Afterward Carol packed her things to go for a walk, and I headed up the stairs one last time.

There was one more woman in the attic: Agnes Hocking. I wanted to think that Agnes's books had once been intermingled with Ernest's, but even if they had, by the time I came across them, stuffed haphazardly in Budweiser boxes at the far end of the attic, they'd been forsaken for many years. Her jottings and letters were upstairs as well, and although I thought that she'd been the one to initially organize the attic, she'd taken great care with all the family's papers except her own.

I remembered Jill's remark that growing up at West Wind, surrounded by her grandfather's treasures, she'd always been interested in philosophy but had never felt at liberty to pursue it. Apparently it simply wasn't considered an option for the “gentler sex.” In the 1980s Jill's father, Richard, had carefully copied and collated Ernest's letters, eventually paying Harvard no small amount of money to house the collection. I imagined Richard visiting the archivists at Harvard, pronouncing “Father” with the same strange mix of reverence and terror that the granddaughters said “Grandfather.” Saving Ernest's papers was, for Richard, a monumental act of filial piety.

In a telling act of self-effacement (or humility), Richard, himself a proficient philosopher who'd had a long career at Emory University, placed his own books in the lower barn in the field below the library. This was the real place where things came to perish. If the scat was any indication, it was home to generations of mice, raccoons, and porcupines. A structure at once enormous and rickety, it was supported by hulking wooden beams that were in turn secured by a massive reinforcing chain. The chain wrapped around the rafters, and the internal supports appeared to be the only thing holding the barn together. Inside the building was a rusted-out Model-T, dilapidated farm equipment, and enough waterlogged antique furniture to furnish another West Wind. Plus seven thousand of Richard's moldy books. The hierarchy was clear: William Ernest Hocking's books were in the library, Richard's were in the barn, and Agnes's were in the attic.

Had Agnes had a library of her own, it would have been full of poetry and fairy tales. When Plato, in
The Republic
, says that the poet is a “light and winged and holy thing,” he may as well be describing Agnes Hocking. By many accounts, Agnes was quite eccentric—the woman actually believed in fairies—but she was also absolutely steadfast in her personal loyalties and intellectual commitments. She was, from beginning to end, an educator.

In 1916, when the Hockings “could find no suitable instruction for their young children” in the schools of Cambridge and Boston, she founded Shady Hill School. I rummaged through the attic debris: clippings and invitations and long notes and grocery lists—the sorts of things my own grandmother had kept in troves in her house. Agnes and my grandmother, Hazel, were pack rats, brought up in an age when nothing—not even the trash—was wasted.

Under the wreckage was a set of
Atlantic
magazines carefully wrapped in newspaper and bound up in twine. A dozen copies of the same issue from December 1955. Someone had taken great care in wrapping these, so I took equal care in unwrapping them. This wasn't a first edition of Hobbes or Descartes, but it had been precious to someone. I settled down on a crate to read the article on page 63: “Creating a School” by Agnes and Ernest Hocking. Ernest had churned out hundreds of publications over his professional career (294, to be exact), but this was, I imagined, one of Agnes's cherished few.

“Cambridge is a school bearing town,” the couple explained, “and justly proud of it.” But in 1915 the Agassiz School, which had for decades educated the children of Harvard professors, planned to close its doors. Agnes and Ernest recounted, “Our eight-year-old son, Richard, began to bring home caustic teacher's reports; long division was getting him down. What could a parent do?… [T]his was no moment for us to start a school … but if circumstances required, one of us was ready to meet the challenge.”

More specifically, Agnes was ready to meet the challenge. At first it didn't look like much—just twenty kids gathered Montessori-style on the back porch of the Hockings' home at 16 Quincy Street in Cambridge. But this was the start of the “Cooperative Open Air School,” which would become Shady Hill School, a model of the “experience curriculum” of twentieth-century education. Enrollment grew steadily, and soon the fledgling school had outgrown the porch. Agnes and Ernest floated the idea of establishing an experimental school at Harvard (modeled after John Dewey's school at the University of Chicago), but this plan was quickly abandoned. The Hockings would have to go it alone with the financial backing of Richard Cabot, Paul Sachs (of Goldman Sachs), and Mrs. Edward Forbes (of
Forbes
magazine).

In the summer of 1916 Agnes had raised $9,750 (which may not sound like much, but is in fact the equivalent of about a quarter of a million dollars today) and purchased land for the new school from the old Charles Eliot Norton estate, Shady Hill. This was the next best thing to being affiliated with Harvard—and no small plot for a midwestern couple to lay claim to. The Norton estate was the heart and soul of Harvard, and its owner was widely regarded as the most cultivated man in America. Before 1874, when he was appointed professor of the history of the fine arts at Harvard, Charles Eliot Norton acquired a reputation as a Dante scholar, one matched only by James Russell Lowell. Norton had followed Emerson in translating
La Vita Nuova
in 1859, and his prose version of the
Divine Comedy
remained in wide circulation after the turn of the century. Shady Hill was the place where classicists, Transcendentalists, and up-and-coming pragmatists would gather: Emerson, Lowell, Agassiz, Chauncey Wright, Henry and William James, Royce, and Santayana. And now Agnes and Ernest Hocking.

The Shady Hill School might have looked a bit like a Montessori school, offering the type of progressive education that encouraged students to pursue their own interests instead of following a strict curriculum, but looks could be deceiving. Yes, Agnes had a “constitutional aversion to textbooks,” but this did not translate into pedagogical laxity or an educational free-for-all. Agnes Hocking believed that bringing young children into contact with original literary sources—Homer, Shakespeare, Dante—would go a long way in cultivating mature and sustaining intellectual interests. (Shady Hillers still read
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey
in fourth grade.) The Hockings wrote that they

were often classified as progressive—chiefly, I suspect, on the ground of a certain informality in our procedures, which led to the supposition that, like the typical progressive school, we were consulting and catering to the existing “interests” of children. Our principle was the exact reverse of this. Interest was of course of first importance, and we secured it; but not by bending our work to what was on the surface of children's minds. We expect children to take an interest in what was worthy of their interest; and with teachers who cared for their subjects, they did so.

The Hockings objected to what they called the “yielding morass of progressivism,” the idea that still holds sway in certain educational settings that children should be given free rein over their intellectual destinies. This freedom, often self-serving and self-centered, was, according to the Hockings, no freedom at all. Education was not about satisfying the interests that children already had, but about awakening them to the possibility of pursuing broader and more meaningful ones. In the words of Mary Williams, one of its former students, the lessons at Shady Hill were “over our heads at all times. But within our reach. We were always pulling ourselves up to exciting new levels.” It sounded to me a bit like purgatory—torturously inspiring. In Ernest's words:

Poetry class is Mrs. Hocking standing on the front porch in spring with eight children at her feet with Doric columns. She swayed as she recited to us … Over our heads she would wave her hands, gloves flying … Her voice conveyed excitement. Presently we looked up, too. By then the world had become bright with images, rich in feeling. To us it was not necessarily coherent; it was rapturous. Like poetry, Mrs. Hocking aroused an exuberance that was supra-rational.

This was Plato's divine madness and the definitive argument that it could, and should, be at the heart of education. As one of the original brochures for the school made clear, Agnes's suprarational exuberance had a pointedly rational aim: to “provide life with all possible richness and fullness; to secure freedom
with
self-control.” This sounds grave and boring—with Kantian undertones Carol would have loved—but it wasn't. Shady Hill was a place where children fell happily in love with both this educational aim and their headmistress.

*   *   *

May Sarton adored Agnes Hocking. In the 1970s Sarton would become one of the most popular women writers in America, an icon of feminist and lesbian literature, one of the first women ever to write a journal—
Journal of a Solitude
—that became a bestseller. But in 1917 Sarton was five years old and one of the youngest pupils at Shady Hill. I poked around the stacks of books in the attic until I found Sarton's memoir,
I Knew a Phoenix
, and returned to my crate. “There is no doubt,” Sarton wrote, “that [my] creative mind stemmed in those early years from the genius of Agnes Hocking, the school's founder and moving spirit.” It was such a relief to read those words. I was so tired of hearing about Agnes's submissiveness, about how she'd been, in the words of one of Ernest's biographers, “an excellent practitioner in the wifely art of ferreting out ambiguities and opaque passages in a husband's work.” Sarton had a very different take on Agnes and her work: “The school was born of [the] marriage of poetry and philosophy, and though philosophy was worshipped, poetry ruled.” If there were even a sniff of misogyny at Shady Hill, Sarton would have been the first to let us know. She'd made her career articulating the subtle and not so subtle injustices of gender bias, so I couldn't imagine that she would have given the Hockings a pass. Sarton went on about Shady Hill for many pages, and at the end of the chapter, I'd begun to think that Agnes was in fact the “phoenix” Sarton had known in her youth.