It could be argued that ideas about learning and growing intellectually and spiritually, education, in a word, are the heart of American transcendentalism. Even the transcendentalists' most literary works are explorations, open-ended and suggestive, both conducted by the author and, as they always hoped, the reader. All of the major transcendentalists--Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Palmer, Alcott, Brownson, Very and more--spent years in the classroom as teachers, and all had found traditional education to be inadequate and stultifying.