In his youth, however, Adams hates the rote
memorization and formalities of school. He would
rather go to see Washington than read about it,
which he does at age 12, and he seems to think
application lies in actual experience and not formal
schooling (although he does have a predilection
for languages and mathematics). Eventually, like
all upper-class New England boys, Adams enters
Harvard, where he later concludes that he learned
nothing, or all that he learned could have been done
in four months’ time. Harvard, then, does nothing to
improve Adams’s transition to experience—it seems
it was still the beginning point. And teaching pro-
vides him with no relief. As a professor of medieval
history at Harvard, he is successful, producing many
respectable students; however, his upbringing in the
Adams fold has taught him never to be satisfied
with mediocrity, which he finds in his education.
And although he has the experience of education
behind him, Adams feels his journey is not done.
In fact, all of Adams’s life as documented in the
Autobiography is a progression from innocence to
experience. Adams often reflects on his early heroes,
not necessarily acquiring new ones but comparing
the old ones to the heroic figures of his day. He
compares Ulysses S. Grant to Washington, claiming
a sad degeneration of mankind in the former from
the latter. And although his life progresses through-
out his education and he moves through a succession
of careers with success, he constantly notes that his
education has come, sadly, to some kind of end.
Still, by the Chicago Exposition of 1893, Adams
admits he is still innocent in a certain way. He
knows how to look at art, he knows how to study
history, and he has a storehouse of information
and a wealth of 18th-century values. However, he
has no way to assimilate the new technology at the
exposition—he cannot reconcile these exhibits with
any experience he has had. Adams is completely
innocent in the ways of the changing world. This is
especially evident when he encounters the dynamo,
the newest power generator. What Adams finds he
has to do is to somehow find a link from the past to
the present—to, in this case, the powerful and awe-
some dynamo—so that he can understand the shift
the world is making.
The narrative in the Autobiography leads up
to this culminating point, where Adams must
move from innocence to experience by coming to
a historical understanding of mankind. From this
understanding, he can then find the natural shifts
in his own life, prompting him to write the Educa-
tion. And he finds the answer in his use of symbols,
which have played such an important part of his
life. What Adams discovers is that although the
dynamo is a relatively new force, forces have been
around since the beginning of time. The dynamo
is, in effect, the symbol for a new era. Past eras such
as the Middle Ages, Adams concludes, found their
symbols in religion, especially the Virgin Mary. In
order to come to an awareness of some kind of force,
he contends, man symbolized it, much like Adams
had done in his youth with the forces around him.
The concept of force, then, plays a fundamental
role in his view of history and life—force becomes
symbolized to represent its power on and within the
lives of people. In a sense, Adams’s Education comes
to represent the forces exterior to his own life, and
the book becomes a symbol for his progression from
innocence to experience.
Michael Modarelliscience and tecHnOlOGy in The Education
of Henry Adams
As a child, young Henry grows up with what he
describes as an 18th-century mind-set, but his view
must soon change to accompany the introduction
of new science and technology in the 19th century.
The Adamses, a lineage tracing back to the United
States’s foundation as a nation, were symbolic of
America, and young Henry sees the connections
between his family and American nationhood. The
Massachusetts State House, New England, his
grandfather John Quincy Adams, and the entire
Adams family symbolize the educated mind and
its entry into a new world. Adams reflects on this
especially as his grandfather walks him to school, a
symbolic entry into education.
Adams links the mind and its application to
changing epochs in symbols. As a historian, Adams
has studied the Middle Ages, and he notices the
power of the symbol in the Virgin Mary. Later, at
the Chicago Exposition of 1893, he notes the grow-132 Adams, Henry