25.Ben Franklin: The Underground History of American
Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Ben
Franklin
Ben Franklin was born on Milk Street, Boston, on January 17, 1706. His
father had seventeen children
(four died at birth) by two wives. Ben was the youngest. Josiah, the father, was a candlemaker, not part of
the gentry. His tombstone tells us he was "without an estate or any gainful employment"
which apparently means his trade didn't allow
wealth to be amassed. But, as the talkative
tombstone continues, "By constant labor and industry with God's blessing they maintained a large family
comfortably, and brought up
thirteen children and seven grandchildren reputably."
Writing to his own
son at the age of sixty- five, Ben Franklin referred to his circumstances as "poverty and obscurity"
from which he rose to a state of affluence, and to some degree, reputation. The means he used "so
well succeeded" he thought posterity might like to know what they were. Some, he believed,
"would find his example suitable to their own situations, and therefore, fit to be imitated."
At twelve he
was bound apprentice to brother James, a printer. After a few years of
that, and disliking his brother's
authority, he ran away first to New York and soon after to Philadelphia where he arrived broke at
the age of seventeen. Finding work as a printer proved easy, and through his sociable nature and ready
curiosity he made acquaintance
with men of means. One of these induced Franklin to go to London where
he found work as a compositor and
once again brought himself to the attention of men of substance. A merchant brought him back to
Philadelphia in his early twenties as what might today be called an administrative assistant or
personal secretary. From this association, Franklin assembled means to set up his own printing house which
published a newspaper, The
Pennsylvania Gazette, to which he constantly contributed essays.
At twenty-six, he
began to issue "Poor Richard's Almanac," and for the next
quarter century the Almanac spread
his fame through the colonies and in Europe. He involved himself deeper and deeper in public
affairs. He designed an Academy which was
developed later into the University of Pennsylvania; he founded the
American Philosophical Society as
a crossroads of the sciences; he made serious researches into the nature of electricity and other
scientific inquiries, carried on a large number of moneymaking activities; and involved himself heavily in
politics. At the age of forty-two
he was wealthy. The year was 1748.
In 1748, he sold his
business in order to devote himself to study, and in a few years, scientific discoveries gave him a
reputation with the learned of Europe. In politics, he reformed the postal system and began to
represent the colonies in dealings with England, and later France. In 1757, he was sent to England to protest
against the influence of the Penns
in the government of Pennsylvania, and remained there five years, returning
two years later to petition the
King to take the government away from the Penns. He lobbied to repeal the Stamp Act. From 1767 to
1775, he spent much time traveling through France, speaking, writing, and making contacts which
resulted in a reputation so vast it
brought loans and military assistance to the American rebels and finally
crucial French intervention at
Yorktown, which broke the back of the British.
As a writer, politician, scientist, and
businessman, Franklin had few equals among the educated of his day — though he left school at ten. He spent
nine years as American
Commissioner to France. In terms only of his ease with the French
language, of which he had little
until he was in his sixties, this unschooled man's accomplishments are unfathomable by modern pedagogical
theory. In many of his social encounters with French nobility, this candlemaker's son held the fate of the
new nation in his hands, because
he (and Jefferson) were being weighed as emblems of America's ability to overthrow England.
Franklin's
Autobiography is a trove of clues from which we can piece together the
actual curriculum which produced
an old man capable of birthing a nation:
My elder brothers were all put
apprentice to different trades. I was put to the grammar school at eight years of age, my father
intending to devote me, as the tithe of his sons, to the services of the (Anglican) church. My early readiness in
learning to read (which must have
been very early, as I do not remember when I could not read) and the opinion of
all his friends, that I should be
a good scholar, encouraged him in this purpose..! continued, however, at grammar school not quite
one year.
Young Ben was yanked from grammar school
and sent to another type less ritzy and
more nuts and bolts in colonial times: the "writing and
arithmetic"school. There under the
tutelage of Mr. Brownell, an advocate of "mild, encouraging
methods," Franklin failed in
arithmetic:
At ten years old I
was taken home to assist my father in his business.... Accordingly I was employed in cutting wick for candles,
filling the dipping mold and the molds for cast candles. Attending the shop, going on errands, etc. I
disliked the trade, and had a strong
inclination for the sea, but my father declared against it.
There are other less
flattering accounts why Franklin left both these schools and struck out on his own at the age often —
elsewhere he admits to being a leader of mischief, some of it mildly criminal, and to being
"corrected" by his father — but causation is not our concern, only bare facts. Benjamin
Franklin commenced school at third grade age and exited when he would have been in the fifth to become a
tallow chandler's apprentice.
A major part of
Franklin's early education consisted of studying father Josiah, who turns out, himself, to be a pretty fair
example of education without schooling:
He had an excellent constitution... very
strong. ..ingenious. ..could draw prettily... skilled in music. ..a clear pleasing voice.
..played psalm tunes on his violin. ..a mechanical genius... sound understanding... solid judgment in
prudential matters, both private and
public affairs. In the latter, indeed, he was never employed, the numerous
family he had to educate and the
straitness of his circumstances keeping him close to his grade; but I remember well his being frequently
visited by leading people, who consulted him for his opinion in affairs of the town or of the church. ..and showed
a great deal of respect for his
judgment and advice. ..frequently chosen an arbitrator between
contending parties.
We don't need to push too hard to see a
variety of informal training laboratories
incidentally offered in this father/son relationship which had
sufficient time to prove valuable
in Franklin's own development, opportunities that would have been hard to
find in any school.
Josiah drew, he sang,
he played violin — this was a tallow chandler with sensitivity to those areas in which human beings are
most human; he had an inventive nature
("ingenious") which must have provided a constant example to
Franklin that a solution can be
crafted ad hoc to a problem if a man kept his nerve and had proper
self-respect. His good sense,
recognized by neighbors who sought his judgment, was always within earshot of Ben. In this way the boy
came to see the discovery process, various systems of judgment, the role of an active citizen who may become
minister without portfolio simply
by accepting responsibility for others and discharging that
responsibility faithfully:
At his table he liked to have as often
as he could some sensible friend or neighbor to converse with, and always took care to start some ingenious
or useful topic for discourse,
which might tend to improve the minds of his children. By this means he
turned our attention to what was
good, just, and prudent in the conduct of life; and little or no notice was ever taken of what related to the
victuals on the table. ..I was brought up in such perfect inattention to those matters as to be quite
indifferent what kind of food was set
before me.
No course of instruction or quantity of
homework could deliver Franklin's facility with language, only something like Josiah's incidental drills at
the dinner table. We can see
sharply through Franklin's memoir that a tallow chandler can indeed
teach himself to speak to kings.
And there were other themes in the
family Franklin's educational armory besides arts, home demonstrations, regular responsibility, being held to
account, being allowed to overhear
adults solving public and private problems, and constant infusions of good conversation:
He. ..sometimes took
me to walk with him, and see joiners, bricklayers, turners, braziers, etc., at their work, that he might
observe my inclination, and endeavor to fix it on some trade or other.... It has ever since been
a pleasure to me to see good workmen handle their tools; and it has been useful to me, having learnt so much
by it as to be able to do little
jobs myself.
As it is for most
members of a literate society, reading was the largest single element of Franklin's educational
foundation.
From a child I was fond of reading, and
all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books. Pleased with Pilgrim 's Progress my
first collection was of John
Bunyan's works in separate little volumes. I afterwards sold them to
enable me to buy R. Burton's
Historical Collections; they were small chapman's books, and cheap, 40 to
50 in all. My father's little
library consisted chiefly of books in polemic divinity, most of which I read. ...Plutarch 's Lives
there was in which I read abundantly, and I still think that time spent to great advantage. There
was also a book of Defoe's, called an Essay on Projects, and another of Dr. Mather's,
called Essays to Do Good, which perhaps gave me a turn of thinking that had an influence on some of the
principal future events in my life.
You might well ask
how young Franklin was reading Bunyan, Burton, Mather, Defoe, Plutarch, and works of "polemic
divinity" before he would have been in junior high school. If you were schooled in the
brain development lore of academic pedagogy it might seem quite a tour deforce.
How do you suppose
this son of a workingman with thirteen kids became such an effective public speaker that for more
than half a century his voice was heard nationally and internationally on the great questions? He employed a
method absolutely free: he argued
with his friend Collins:
Very fond we were of argument, and very
desirous of confuting one another, which
disputatious turn is based upon contradiction. [Here Franklin warns
against using dialectics on
friendships or at social gatherings] I had caught it [the dialectical habit]
by reading my father's books of
dispute about religion.... A question was started between Collins and me, of the propriety of
educating the female sex in learning, and their abilities to study. He was of the opinion that it was
improper.... I took the contrary side.
Shortly after he began arguing, he also
began reading the most elegant periodical of the day, Addison and Steele's Spectator.
I thought the writing
excellent and wished, if possible, to imitate it. With that in view I took some of the papers, and making
short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book,
try'd to complete the papers
again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it
had been expressed before, in any
suitable words that should come to hand. Then I compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of
my faults, and corrected them.
This method was
hammered out while working a sixty-hour week. In learning eloquence there's only Ben, his determination,
and the Spectator, no teacher. For instance, while executing rewrites, Franklin came to realize his vocabulary
was too barren:
I found I wanted a
stock of words... which I thought I should have acquired before that time if I had gone on making verses;
since the continual occasion for words of the same import, but of different length, to suit the measure, or of
different sound for the rhyme,
would have laid me under a constant necessity of searching for variety,
and also have tended to fix that
variety in my mind and make me master of it. As a good empiricist he tried a home cure for this
deficiency: I took some tales
and turned them into verse; and after a time when I had pretty well forgotten the prose, turned them back
again. I also sometimes jumbled my collection of hints [his outline] into confusions and after some weeks
endeavored to reduce them into the
best order, before I began to form the full sentences and complete the paper.
This was to
teach me method in the arrangement of thoughts. By comparing my work afterwards with the original I discovered many
faults and amended them; but I sometimes thought... I had been lucky enough to improve the method or the
language.
By the time he was
sixteen Franklin was ready to take up his deficiencies in earnest with full confidence he could by his own
efforts overcome them. Here's how he handled that problem with arithmetic:
Being on some
occasion made asham'd of my ignorance in figures, which I had twice failed in learning when at school, I
took Crocker's book of Arithmetick, and went through the whole by myself with great ease. I also read
Seller's and Shermy's book of
Navigation and became acquainted with the geometry they contain.
This school dropout tells us he was also
reading John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, as well as studying the arts of rhetoric and
logic, particularly the Socratic
method of disputation, which so charmed and intrigued him that he
abruptly dropped his former
argumentative style, putting on the mask of "the humble inquirer and
doubter":
I found this method safest for myself
and very embarrassing to those against whom I used it; therefore I took a delight in it, practis'd it
continually, and grew very artful and expert in drawing people, even of superior knowledge, into
concessions, the consequences of
which they did not foresee, entangling them in difficulties out of which
they could not extricate
themselves, and so obtaining victories that neither myself nor my cause
always deserved.
Might there be an instructive parallel
between teaching a kid to drive as my uncle taught me to do at age eleven, and the incredible opportunities
working-class kids like Franklin
were given to develop as quickly and as far as their hearts and minds
allowed? We drive, regardless of
our intelligence or characters, because the economy demands it; in
colonial America through the early
republic, a pressing need existed to get the most from everybody. Because of that need,
unusual men and unusual women appeared in great numbers to briefly give the lie to traditional social order.
In that historical instant,
thousands of years of orthodox suppositions were shattered. In the words
of Eric Hoffer, "Only here in
America were common folk given a chance to show what they could do on their own without a master to push and
order them about." Franklin and Edison, multiplied many times, were the result.
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