Why is Edmund removed from Thoreau's school in Act I of The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail?

In the play The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail, by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, one of Thoreau’s pupils is a boy named Edmund. One day, when Edmund does not show up at school, his sister Ellen explains his absence.

ELLEN.  Father’s worried – because he thinks Edmund’s learning too much. . . . I’m afraid Father doesn’t want him to come to your school at all any more.

HENRY. (Bridling) Oh. Your Father’s opposed to knowledge.

ELLEN.  No. He’s opposed to Transcendentalists. That’s what he says you are.

Edmund is removed from school, then, not because he is learning either too little or too much but because he is learning how to think like a transcendentalist. In other words, not only is he being schooled in specific transcendentalist ideas, but, even more significantly, he is learning to doubt, question, probe, and not settle for conventional, traditional answers to the questions that occur to him. Edmund’s father would not be disturbed if Edmund were very quickly absorbing all the kinds of answers considered traditional and appropriate. Instead, he is disturbed because Edmund is learning, from Thoreau, to think for himself. Edmund’s father sees school as a place (in a sense) for indoctrination, not whole-hearted and untrammeled investigation. It is not rote learning that bothers Edmund’s father; instead, what bothers him is genuine and unlimited inquiry.

How does Edmund's withdrawal impact Henry's school in The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail?

In “The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail,” we learn that Henry and his brother John run their own school. Unfortunately, their student body has dwindled down to just one student: Edmund Sewell, Ellen Sewell’s younger brother. The exchange between Ellen and Henry that brings up this issue occurs on pp. 30-40 of most small paperback editions of the play. Ellen tells Henry that her father is opposed to Transcendentalists, and he will no longer allow Edmund to attend the Thoreau brothers’ school. Henry and Ellen go for a boat ride presumably so he can explain Transcendentalism to her. He is falling in love with her, as is his brother John. When they come back to shore, Ellen asks, “What will happen to your school?”

Henry replies, “I’m going back to it. As a pupil. Maybe I can learn from Nature – and from John …” The implication is that the school will close, and Henry will return to his own personal study of nature. John dies soon afterward, anyway.

This play is a piece of historical fiction, based loosely upon the facts of Thoreau’s life. The brothers did run a school for a few years, and Edmund Sewell was one of their students. But they had to close the school because John’s symptoms of consumption (tuberculosis) had grown worse, and he could no longer teach. It was not because they ran out of students. Both men had been in love with Ellen Sewell in real life, and both of them proposed marriage at separate times. But Ellen turned them both down because her father did not want her to marry a Transcendentalist.