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chapter four Education and Reform Victorian Progressivism in Youth Literature “A full belly is little worth where the mind is starved.” —The Prince and the Pauper “The least of us have some influence in this big world.” —An Old-Fashioned Girl M arkTwain and Louisa May Alcott demonstrate repeatedly their shared belief that education is the most powerful tool for reform available to the American public.Their belief was such a widely held ideology that it was seldom questioned in the nineteenth century—or since. Henry J. Perkinson identifies Americans’ faith in education as having its roots in both Puritanism and the rationalist thinking that influenced the Revolution and the Constitution. He refers to Americans’ ideological faith in education as an “imperfect panacea” because U.S. citizens so often—and so wrongly—turn to education as the best possible cure for all social ills (xi, 6–10). Perkinson notes that Jacksonian democrats promoted public schools as something that could make America more democratic in the 1820s, and Anne Scott MacLeod demonstrates how the common school system established by the Jacksonians created a literate nation (MacLeod 188–90). When de Tocqueville toured America in 1831, he wrote, “The first duty imposed on those who now direct society is to educate democracy” (12). From 1870, which marked the beginning of the decade in which Twain began publishing for youth audiences, to 1915, five years after his death, the number of children enrolled in schools jumped from seven million to twenty million (Mintz 174). Americans increased their financial commitment to education during the same years by raising their school expenditures from $63 million to $605 million (Mintz 174). Twain’s and Alcott’s faith in education was as common as faith in American democracy and probably more common than faith in God during the Gilded Age. While it is no great intellectual feat to observe either author (or any of their contemporaries who wrote juveniles) in the act of writing about educa70 tion ideologically, it is certain that Twain and Alcott were more widely read both during their lifetimes and afterwards than perhaps any other juvenile author of their age. As a result, the ways that Twain and Alcott employ children or childlike characters to help proliferate the ideology of the imperfect panacea seem to have been particularly influential on the development of the adolescent novel in the United States. For Alcott, liberal education almost invariably leads to improved morality, while forTwain, education is a doubleedged sword that can bestow great wisdom and/or create great corruption. But for both, the purpose of education is to allow the individual to reach his or her greatest potential. And even though these two authors write in different genres, they imbue the protagonists of their novels for youth with a heavy responsibility to use their education to reform other people and, in the process, improve the world. Their ideological observations about education take two forms: in some novels, their adolescent characters are reformers whose actions or observations convey ideology overtly, while in other novels, the need for educational reform is only implied. But either way,Twain and Alcott rely on novels for youth to provide them with platforms from which to advocate reform. When they employ adolescent characters as reformers, they do so because of the adolescent’s potential for growth and the hope that youth represents. In this chapter, then, I investigate the educational ideologies at work in Twain’s and Alcott’s novels that specifically employ adolescence to convey the ideology of education as a panacea: An Old-Fashioned Girl, The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Little Men, and, briefly, Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective. Throughout these novels run several shared themes. First, as I have noted, liberal education is a panacea for most social ills. Second, these novels present the Emersonian concept that the educated individual is an empowered individual. Third, youth who are “improving souls” can educate those around them in moral improvement. Fourth, children learn more from inductive teaching methods than they do from rote memorization. Fifth, education effects social mobility. Sixth, misapplied education is a dangerous thing. Finally, virtually every one of these novels also touches on some other aspect ofVictorian progressivism: hygiene, dress reform, penal reform, Magdalene reform. Informing all the novels under discussion in this chapter is an insistence that educated youth are capable of themselves being reformers. The patterns Twain and Alcott established with Huck and Jo serving...

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