Bronson Alcott, while he started life as an itinerant gizmo salesman, had as his life's passion the reform of traditional education methods. He founded a school in Boston that treated children as fully intelligent beings worthy of respect and affection rather than as discipline problems. His open and natural approach to education was not appreciated there, but it was perfectly congenial in Transcendentalist Concord. Here he was ultimately commissioned Concord's superintendent of schools, and he opened a "School of Philosophy" in a building in his backyard.