Bronson Alcott believed that education should emphasize play and the imagination as activities through which children learn and develop physically, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. His educational system was too different from conventional educational practices of the time to become firmly established. The family was often in need of money, and they moved several times between Boston and Concord, Massachusetts.
Alcott and her sisters were taught at home by their father, who brought them into contact with some of America's greatest writers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), and Margaret Fuller (1810–1850). The Alcott girls were required to keep journals, and together they wrote a family newspaper and plays in which they performed. Their education also included domestic skills, from housekeeping to sewing and clothes-making.
About the time Alcott turned eleven in 1843, the family joined a communal living experiment at Fruitlands, a farm in Harvard, Massachusetts. (Communal living involves several people or families who live together as a group—sharing work, expenses, and the fruits of their labor). Alcott wrote about the experiences in her journal, which were later published, in 1889, in Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals.
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