The Beginning of the Education of Henry Adams: The Inception of America’s Tutor

“EXCEPT for politics, Mount Vernon Street had the merit of leaving the boy-mind supple, free to turn with the world, and if one learned next to nothing, the little one did learn needed not to be unlearned. The surface was ready to take any form that education should cut into it...” (Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, “Washington.”)

Henry Adams grew up in a world trying to deal with the mutability and tribulations of the 19th century. The movement of Unitarianism flowered in Boston in 1825, which eventually grew from a Christian sect to a syncretistic, multi-devotional amalgamation of something like religiousness. They focussed on the inherent goodness of man, so that if they are given basic but …show more content…
Though he had improved in some ways, the older Adams still looks back and finds the boy wanting. “Perhaps the chief obstacle to the youth's education, now that he had come of age, was his honesty; his simple-minded faith in his intentions. Even after Berlin had become a nightmare, he still persuaded himself that his German education was a success,” he explained in the beginning of the Rome chapter. In fact, the progress the boy had made the older Adams perceived to be a greater danger than otherwise. “He was in a fair way to do himself lasting harm, floundering between worlds passed and worlds coming, which had a habit of crushing men who stayed too long at the points of contact.” (Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, “Rome”). But the boy remained there, and eventually found himself on break, and traveled to Rome at the behest of his sister who lived in Italy. To the older Adams, “Rome was a bewildering complex of ideas, experiments, ambitions, energies; without her, the Western world was pointless and fragmentary; she gave heart and unity to it all.” (Adams, The Education of Henry Adams,