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PARTISAN REVIEW
One could, of course, argue that Adams worked from a limited sense
of what made the year
I900
so important. His fixation on the dynamo
speaks to a long obsession with the psychodynamics of force, but a case
can be made for other ideas that would change life even more than the
dynamo to which Adams ironically prayed. I am thinking, for example,
of Max Planck's quantum physics and Sigmund Freud's
Interpretation
of Dreams-both
of which burst upon a startled world in
I900.
Adams
might well have included them in his litany of things that his (mis) edu–
cation, at Harvard and elsewhere, had not prepared him for; but the
plain truth is that he allowed the dynamo to become a collective symbol
for his nagging sense that the past was irretrievable, the present chaotic
and confusing, and the future a cause for deep concern. Why so?
Because just as the world of earlier schoolmasters had been turned
upside down by the observations of Copernicus and Galileo, and later,
by Columbus's explorations, so too had the dynamo confounded every
organizing principle that Adams had searched for-presumably in vain.
Granted, Adams's persona was firmly wrapped in the mantle of
failure-so much so that savvy readers soon suspected that he was
protesting just a bit too much about his ignorance and ineptitude. Still,
when he writes that "Nothing in education is so astonishing as the
amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts," we can,
I think, take Adams at his word. "Inert facts," the material that one duti–
fully memorizes and then reproduces on exams, were essentially useless
because they could not be actively applied to rapidly changing situations.
Such "facts" simply sat there, rather like cornflakes in a bowl of milk,
and became increasingly soggy. Here it is worth mentioning that Adams's
proposed subtitle for
The Education
was "A Study of Twentieth-Century
Multiplicity."
If
the Virgin harkened us back to a simpler age, one that
organized and thus unified itself around the force of religion, science
often seemed to dump the human component altogether, preferring the
disinterestedness that is an essential component of the scientific method.
Adams had, in fact, explored the tensions between religion and sci–
ence earlier-in a novel
(Esther,
I
884), and in
Mont-Saint-Michel
(pri–
vately printed in
I904),
to which
The Education
is a sequel. What his
ruminations point toward is nothing less than the rapid collapse of
Western culture as science replaces religion and dehumanized people
increasingly pray to machines rather than to God. Adams may not have
been the "failure" he made himself out to be, but he was surely a sour,
disappointed man. Part of the reason probably lies in the long shadow
cast over his name by great-grandfather John Adams, second president
of the United States, and grandfather John Quincy, our country's sixth
