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Education as Artifact: Benjamin Franklin and Instruction of “A Rising People”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

David Tyack
David Tyack*
Affiliation:
Reed College
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Extract

“All that has happened to you,” an English friend wrote Benjamin Franklin, “is also connected with the detail of the manners and situation of a rising people; and in this respect I do not think that the writings of Caesar and Tacitus can be more interesting to a true judge of human nature and society.” Indeed, the story of Franklin's life has mythic sweep and significance. The son of a soap boiler who stood before kings, a runaway apprentice printer who became minister plenipotentiary, Franklin had a career of constant change and discontinuity. His mobility—intellectual, geographical, social—would have staggered a less resilient man.

Type
Research Article
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , Spring 1966 , pp. 3 - 15
Copyright
Copyright © 1966 by New York University 

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References

Notes

1. Franklin, Benjamin, Autobiography eds. Labaree, Leonard et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), p. 13; this edition, with its superb introduction and notes, will hereafter be cited as Autobiography. Google Scholar

2. Bailyn, Bernard, Education in the Forming of American Society (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), p. 34; in this essay I am much indebted to Professor Bailyn for his provocative questions and comments concerning Franklin on pp. 33-36 and 99.Google Scholar

3. Autobiography, pp. 181-82, 192ff.; in his first mention of the Academy Franklin associated the founding of the school with establishing a militia: “There were however two things that I regretted: There being no Provision for Defence, nor for a compleat Education of Youth; No Militia nor any College.”Google Scholar

4. The Proposals and Idea of the English School are reprinted in Labaree, Leonard and Bell, Whitfield J., (eds.), The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (7 vols.; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), III, 397-421; IV, 102-8.Google Scholar

5. Labaree, III, 397-8; (Franklin mistook Francis Hutcheson as the author of Dialogues concerning Education, the actual author being David Fordyce); IV, 72, 74; Autobiography, p. 143; on Franklin's irony see the brilliant essay by Carl Becker, “Benjamin Franklin,” Dictionary of American Biography, VI, 585-98; Eugene D. Owen makes a tenuous case that Franklin relied on the Rev. Philip Doddredge, dissenting minister and teacher, for his stress on English (through their common acquaintance George Whitefield) in “Where Did Benjamin Franklin Get the Idea for his Academy,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, LVIII (January 1934), 86–94; Sizer, Theodore R. (ed.), The Age of the Academies (Teachers College, Classics in Education, No. 22) (New York: Teachers College, 1964), p. 8.Google Scholar

6. Labaree, III, 412; cf. Autobiography, pp. 57-58 (on Plutarch), 161-62, 148-57.Google Scholar

7. Labaree, III, 408-9; cf. Autobiography, pp. 60-62, 121, 124.Google Scholar

8. Labaree, III, 416-17; Autobiography, pp. 240-46; Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin (New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1938), chap. 6.Google Scholar

9. Labaree, III, 412-13; Autobiography, pp. 60-61, 64-65, 117, 159-60; Thorpe, Francis N. (ed.), Benjamin Franklin and the University of Pennsylvania (United States Bureau of Education, Circular of Information No. 2, 1892) (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1893), chaps. 1-3.Google Scholar

10. O'Neill, John J., “An Analysis of Franklin's Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania as a Selection of Eighteenth Century Cultural Values” (unpublished Ed.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1960), p. vii, passim; in this useful study Professor O'Neill regards Franklin's scholarly references as more influential than I consider them to be.Google Scholar

11. Labaree, III, 402-3, 419, 399.Google Scholar

12. Labaree, I, 14-18; Smyth, Albert H. (ed.), The Writings of Benjamin Franklin (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1905-1907), X, 32; it is significant that in this essay Franklin uses the uncharacteristic expedient of footnotes to prove his point as he had in the Proposals decades before.Google Scholar

13. Labaree, III, 410-11; on conservatism in American education see Labaree, Leonard, Conservatism in Early American History (New York: New York University Press, 1948), chap. 4; and Middlekauff, Robert, Ancients and Axioms: Secondary Education in Eighteenth Century New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), Intro. to Part I.Google Scholar

14. Labaree, III, 415; Van Doren, p. 150.Google Scholar

15. Labaree, III, 404, 41; Best, John H. (ed.), Benjamin Franklin on Education (Teachers College, Classics in Education, No. 14) (New York: Teachers College, 1962), pp. 12–17; Franklin had originally intended to exclude Latin and Greek from the Academy, but when he showed his draft proposal to local leaders, some “Persons of Wealth and Learning, whose Subscriptions and Countenance we should need, being of Opinion that it ought to include the learned Languages, I submitted my Judgment to theirs. …” (Smyth, X, 10); Franklin maintained that a “great Part of the original Subscribers” preferred his emphasis on instruction in English (Smyth, X, 13).Google Scholar

16. Labaree, , III, 413; Doren, Van, pp. 131–32; Autobiography, pp. 147-48; Smyth, , IV, 287.Google Scholar

17. Autobiography, 71, 114; Smyth, , X, 83–85; Labaree, , III, 467.Google Scholar

18. Morgan, Edmund S., The Puritan Family: Essays on Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England (Boston: Boston Public Library, 1944); Shurtleff, Nathaniel B. (ed.), Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England (Boston: William White, 1854), III, 101.Google Scholar

19. Autobiography, pp. 70, 86, 96, 99, 148-60.Google Scholar

20. Conservatism in Early American History, chap. 4; in the latter half of the eighteenth century colleges and secondary schools showed more vitality and willingness to experiment than in the first half-for the bibliography of higher education in the colonial period, see Bailyn, pp. 87-91.Google Scholar

21. Labaree, , III, 400, 427.Google Scholar

22. Smyth, X, 14; O'Neill, pp. 61-62; Labaree, III, 428; Montgomery, Thomas H., A History of the University of Pennsylvania from Its Foundation to A.D. 1770; Including Biographical Sketches of the Trustees, Faculty, the First Alumni and Others (Philadelphia: George Jacobs & Co., 1900), pp. 53–109; Cheyney, Edward P., History of the University of Pennsylvania (Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1940), p. 30; Cheyney comments that “Franklin, though he became wealthy, eminent, and influential, was never quite considered, nor did he consider himself, a member of the upper class in Philadelphia. … [he was] bitter and sarcastic … towards those he describes as ‘Men of Wealth and Influence.’”Google Scholar

23. Autobiography, p. 196 (footnote).Google Scholar

24. Smyth, X, 9-32; Woody (ed.), Thomas, Educational Views of Benjamin Franklin (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1931), pp. 191–228.Google Scholar

25. Labaree, I, 256-59.Google Scholar

26. Labaree, III, 400.Google Scholar

27. Labaree, IV, 35-37.Google Scholar

28. Doren, Van, p. 37; Autobiography, pp. 116-18; Labaree, I, 256-59.Google Scholar

29. Doren, Van, pp. 644–45, 709; Autobiography, pp. 70-71.Google Scholar

30. Sayre, Robert F., The Examined Self: Benjamin Franklin, Henry Adams, Henry James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), pp. 18, 22.Google Scholar

31. Doren, Van, pp. 272, 570, 631, 719; Parton, James, Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (2 vols.; New York: Mason Bros., 1864), II, 587.Google Scholar

32. Bailyn, pp. 35-36.Google Scholar