Adam and education

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KatieC
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Who is your favorite Bonanza character?: Adam
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Adam and education

Post by KatieC »

This all started with the following comment Garbanzo made in the “Dead and Gone” thread. but since once I started thinking about it, I got carried away, so finally I thought it deserves its own thread here. I’d love to read other people’s opinions on the topic.
Garbanzo wrote: Thu Jun 09, 2022 5:24 amI sometimes wondered why David Dortort made Adam a university-educated cowboy, and the only one of his brothers to pursue a higher education. I would think if Hoss or Joe expressed a desire to go to university, Ben would have sent them too. At that time, it would have made Adam quite an isolated figure in Nevada, someone who loved poetry and music in a hard-scrabble mining town.
I did wonder myself why Adam was the only one so much interested in learning, literature and arts. And I think it’s part his personality, part his childhood.

The way I imagine it: we can see in some episodes that Ben had some education and some interest in books himself. I think he would probably share it a bit more with his firstborn than the other two — because of Elizabeth, because it was still closer in time to the life he left in Boston, and because they would spend more time just the two of them, Adam and Ben, sitting in a wagon and having a lot of time to talk. Whereas when Joe was a boy, Ben was busy running the Ponderosa, their life was different and Ben himself was a different man from the Ben who had left Boston with baby Adam all those years ago.

Secondly, Adam’s early life was rather solitary. They moved from place to place, so he wouldn’t be able to make long-lasting friendships, he probably never really went to school. So the way I imagine it, in order to keep little Adam occupied and out of trouble, Ben would give him books, and they could have become Adam’s friends in a way – not only a form of entertainment, but also a sort of escape, and maybe first of all, a source of information. For a young, very intelligent and curious boy who grew up basically in a wagon moving through the country, books would be fascinating windows to the world. Hoss and Joe, apart from different personalities, had different lives from Adam’s — they weren’t left alone for long periods of time, because Adam was there when Ben was working, and they didn’t need to figure out as many things on their own, because they had their older brother to teach them. Of course I think Ben taught Adam a lot too, especially that I doubt Adam ever went to a real school, so the basics of his education were Ben’s responsibility. Maybe he went to one for a couple of weeks here and there when they stopped at a town that had a school, but that’s basically it. Even when they settled in Nevada, Virginia City and Carson City didn’t exist yet, so there would still be no school Adam could attend to, even if he didn’t have to take care of little Hoss. (Although the show suggests Abigail Jones was a schoolteacher in Joe’s times, which poses the question where was that school located, because it couldn’t have been VC).

Considering all this, I think it’s an even bigger wonder that Adam managed to get admitted to a college in Boston, because he probably had to prepare for the exams all by himself. It took a lot of intelligence, hard work, determination and courage. Which are the qualities Adam definitely possesses on the show, which is another reason why out of the three brothers, he was the one to get college education, in my opinion.
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