Educator

A New England Childhood.

Born in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, in 1830, John Swett was descended from New England farming families whose ancestors arrived in America as early as 1642. Like many children of his and the preceding generation, he combined intermittent lessons at district school with labor on the family farm. Able to attend Pittsfield Academy in the mid 1840s, at the age of seventeen he became a teacher, achieving immediate success and the nickname "Old Swett" because of his youth. Swett never attended college, but when he taught at Randolph, Massachusetts, he heard lectures by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker, during a short sojourn at Russell's Normal Institute on the Merrimac River he met William Russell, an associate of Horace Mann and the first editor of the American Journal of Education from 1826 to 1829. As a child and youth Swett was not influenced by evangelical...