Education
Adams presents himself as a scientist who will sample and test various methods of education so that he may offer some wisdom for a man facing the twentieth century. As he says in the preface, ‘‘no one has discussed what part of education has, in his personal experience, turned out to be useful, and what not. This volume attempts to discuss it.’’ Traditional systems of education are soundly rejected; a schoolmaster is ‘‘a man employed to tell lies to little boys.’’ The lecture system found in colleges does not fair much better nor does scientific education: ‘‘the theory of scientific education failed where most theory fails—for want of money.’’

In the rejection of standard educational systems, Adams formulates an alternative understanding of education. The acquisition of knowledge should not be the mastery of the schoolmaster’s unity or the complete embrace of all possible scientific facts. Instead, education ‘‘required conflict, competition, contradiction’’ and ‘‘accidental education’’ in order to see the ‘‘world exactly as it is.’’ For this reason, he emphasizes those moments in life when he learned by accident. His experience with men, from his grandfather to his students, teaches him about power and the benefit of a balanced mind. His experience with women teaches the profound problem of multiplicity. Accidental education causes Adams to realize that society does not educate itself ‘‘or aimed at a conscious purpose." Consequently, Adams notes that successful minds are those that react to the capriciousness of reality.

While Adams hints throughout the work that education amounts to self-knowledge, his formulation of self-knowledge involves an understanding of the journey he has been through. Toward the end of the text, Adams says:

Every man with self-respect enough to become effective, if only as a machine, has had to account to himself for himself somehow, and to invent a formula of his own for his universe, if the standard formulas failed, there, whether finished or not, education stopped.

Though a man may ‘‘invent a formula,’’ his success is not assured. To prove this, Adams compares the fate of Clarence King and John Hay, two men who were able to formulate their universe and be effective. Hay masters the instruments of state in order to guide the foreign policy of the country through two administrations. King also has a formula—literally, he has an ingenious one for surveying the 40th parallel. However, King’s story proves that science cannot exist independently of money, which King loses in the economic downturn of 1893.

Technology
For Adams, technology is intrinsic to an understanding of the great difference between the late nineteenth and the thirteenth century. Moreover, technology holds the key to a bright future so long as a new mind will emerge within society that will not be overawed by it. Adams’ inability to react appropriately to science and technology exacerbates his propensity for failure. This is presented early in the work through Adams’ preference for a non-technological Boston to which the Boston and Albany Railroad has come regardless of his wishes. To his credit, Adams stubbornly faces the source of his discomfort with technology, especially with coal.

Adams constantly watches out for the extent to which a society, starting with his own, is burning coal. He knows that coal fuels industry, which fuels the economy. The cost to a society is the illness of its workers and of sections of the country. Still, Adams feels everyone must face up to coal in all its forms. For this reason, Adams describes coal production as a ‘‘Black District, another lesson, which needed much more to be rightly felt.’’ Facing coal and its lesson...