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  • A Space for Science: Science Education and the Domestic in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Men
  • Allison Speicher

The school is a space for science. Such was the consensus of the contributors to the Massachusetts Teacher in the mid-nineteenth century, who repeatedly asserted that the diverse benefits of teaching young children science far outweighed the difficulties of making space for it in both the curriculum and the classroom. These benefits, contends one writer, “cover the whole ground of human culture — physical, intellectual, moral, spiritual, and practical” (“Natural History” 365). Studying nature “invigorates, inspires, and delights” the child, “quickens, and sharpens, and incites the intellect,” nourishes a “spirit of a generous liberality,” “favors the formation of all those traits of character which tend to make the individual a practical and efficient person,” and “leads both mind and heart upward to the All-creator” (ibid.). As such, science should be incorporated into school curricula as soon as possible, but, because it will probably be “a long while” before this occurs, children should be schooled in it at home (“A Talk” 435).

These two sites of learning — the home and the school — were seldom entirely distinct in the eyes of advocates of science education. The educational theories of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, which provided the inspiration for their methodologies, also stressed the need for the school to be as homelike as possible (Hamblen 82). Common school advocates and reformers embraced these theories too, arguing their applicability to all children but particularly to children of the poor, who, it was believed, most needed the moral education a homelike school could offer (Kaestle 67). As a result, schools targeted to the masses, especially the impoverished masses, were renovated physically and pedagogically to be more homelike. Jessica Enoch claims that this desire to blend school and home, epitomized by changes in school architecture that aimed to turn schools from “prisons” to “homes” and by the substitution of moral suasion for corporal punishment, increasingly opened a space for female educators (276). [End Page 63]

In her novel Little Men (1871), Louisa May Alcott metaphorically stepped into this space. Her representation of a co-educational boarding school run jointly by Jo March (familiar to her readers from Little Women) and her husband allowed Alcott to develop her own unique theory of education. No school is more like a home than a boarding school, particularly if it is like Plumfield, run by the benevolent Mother and Father Bhaer. Little Men literalizes the commingling of home and school, but, in contrast to the ideal schools and homes imagined in the Massachusetts Teacher, the fit of science in this space is uneasy. As the selections above indicate, science education (and schooling in general) was often presented as a panacea, capable of providing students with mental discipline, moral instruction, and useful knowledge. Little Men assesses the ability of science education to fulfill these roles. Science education emerges throughout the novel primarily as a means to an end, though it is more useful in achieving some ends than others. The students who most heartily embrace science, Dan and Nan, are also the most decidedly un-domestic graduates of Plumfield, and their science education gives them access to alternatives to home life, for good or for ill. I read Plumfield as a space in which Alcott assesses the potentials and limitations of science education in the home-school. The novel vacillates between Alcott’s validation of science education and her investment in the domesticity that a career in science seems to preclude. Science education is both embraced and displaced in Little Men. It helps the Bhaers reach and keep their most rebellious pupils but often proves insufficient in inculcating the lessons most prized at Plumfield, lessons in morality.

In her embrace of particular kinds of science education for particular pupils, Alcott exposes tensions in the goals of science educators by questioning one of the premises that underpins them: the idea that all students will acquire and use their scientific learning in the same ways. One of the major obstacles to the widespread integration of science in school curricula was that each time a new subject was added it competed for time with existing subjects...

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