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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