II | Franklin's Theories of Education
Franklin's penchant for projects manifests itself nowhere more fully than in his schemes of education, both self and formal. One may deduce a pattern of educational principles not undeservedly called Franklin's theories of education, theories which he successfully institutionalized, from an examination of his Junto ("the best school of philosophy, morality, and politics that then existed in the province"[i-76]), his Philadelphia Library Company (his "first project of a public nature"[i-77]), his Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge among the British Plantations in America, calling for a scientific society of ingenious men or virtuosi, his Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania and Idea of the English School, which eventually fathered the University of Pennsylvania, and from his fragmentary notes in his correspondence.
Variously apotheosized, patronized, or damned for his practicality, expediency, and opportunism, dramatized for his allegiance to materiality, Franklin has commonly been viewed (and not only through the popular imagination) as one fostering in the American mind an unimaginative, utilitarian prudence, motivated by the pedestrian virtues of industry, frugality, and thrift. Whatever the educational effect of Franklin's life and writings on American readers, we shall find that his works contain schemes and theories which transcend the more mundane habits and utilitarian biases ascribed to him.
Franklin progressively felt "the loss of the learned education" his father had planned for him, as he realized in his hunger for knowledge that he must repair the loss through assiduous reading, accomplished during hours stolen from recreation and sleep.[i-78] Proudly he confessed that reading was his "only amusement."[i-79] In 1727 he formed the Junto, or Leather Apron Club, his first educational project. Franklin was never more eclectic than when founding the Junto. To prevent Boston homes from becoming "the porches of hell,"[i-80] Cotton Mather had created mutual improvement societies through which neighbors would help one another "with a rapturous assiduity."[i-81] Mather in his Essays to do Good proposed:
That a proper number of persons in a neighborhood, whose hearts God hath touched with a zeal to do good, should form themselves into a society, to meet when and where they shall agree, and to consider—"what are the disorders that we may observe rising among us; and what may be done, either by ourselves immediately, or by others through our advice, to suppress those disorders?"[i-82]
Since Franklin's father was a member of one of Mather's "Associated Families" and since Franklin as a boy read Mather's Essays with rapt attention,[i-83] and since his Rules for a Club Established for Mutual Improvement are amazingly congruent with Mather's rules proposed for his neighborly societies, it is not improbable that Franklin in part copied the plans of this older club. One also wonders whether Franklin remembered Defoe's suggestions in Essays upon Several Projects (1697) for the formation of "Friendly Societies" in which members covenanted to aid one another.[i-84] In addition, M. Faÿ has observed that the "ideal which this society [the Junto] adopted was the same that Franklin had discovered in the Masonic lodges of England."[i-85] Then, too, in London during the period of Desaguliers, Sir Hans Sloane, and Sir Isaac Newton, he would have heard much of the ideals and utility of the Royal Society. Many of the questions discussed by the Junto are suggestive of the calendar of the Royal Society:
Is sound an entity or body?
How may the phenomena of vapors be explained?
What is the reason that the tides rise higher in the Bay of Fundy, than the Bay of Delaware?
How may smoky chimneys be best cured?
Why does the flame of a candle tend upwards in a spire?[i-86]
The Junto members, like Renaissance gentlemen, were determined to convince themselves that nothing valuable to the several powers of life should be alien to them. They were urged to communicate to one another anything significant "in history, morality, poetry, physic, travels, mechanic arts, or other parts of knowledge."[i-87] Surely a humanistic catholicity of interest! Schemes for getting on materially, suggestions for improving the laws and protecting the "just liberties of the people,"[i-88] efforts to aid the strangers in Philadelphia (an embryonic association of commerce), curiosity in the latest remedies used for the sick and wounded: all were to engage the minds of this assiduously curious club. Above all, the members must be "serviceable to mankind, to their country, to their friends, or to themselves."[i-89] The intensity of the Junto's utilitarian purpose was matched only by its humanitarian bias. Members must swear that they "love mankind in general, of what profession or religion soever,"[i-90] and that they believe no man should be persecuted "for mere speculative opinions, or his external way of worship." Also they must profess to "love truth for truth's sake," to search diligently for it and to communicate it to others. Tolerance, the empirical method, scientific disinterestedness, and humanitarianism had hardly gained a foothold in the colonies in 1728. On the other hand, the Junto members were urged, when throwing a kiss to the world, not to neglect their individual ethical development.[i-91] Franklin's humanitarian neighborliness is associated with a rigorous ethicism. The members were invited to report "unhappy effects of intemperance," of "imprudence, of passion, or of any other vice or folly," and also "happy effects of temperance, of prudence, of moderation." Franklin reflects sturdily here, and boundlessly elsewhere, the Greek and English emphasis on the Middle Way. If this is prudential, it is an elevated prudence.
The Philadelphia Library Company was born of the Junto and became "the mother of all the North American subscription libraries, now so numerous."[i-92] The colonists, "having no publick amusements to divert their attention from study, became better acquainted with books, and in a few years were observ'd by strangers to be better instructed and more intelligent than people of the same rank generally are in other countries."[i-93] It is curious that although many articles have been written describing the Library Company no one seems to include a study of the climate of ideas represented in its volumes.[i-94] One must be careful not to credit Franklin with solely presiding over the ordering of books. At a meeting in 1732 of the company, Thomas Godfrey, probable inventor of the quadrant and he who learned Latin to read the Principia, notified the body that "Mr. Logan had let him know he would willingly give his advice of the choice of the books... the Committee esteeming Mr. Logan to be a Gentleman of universal learning, and the best judge of books in these parts, ordered that Mr. Godfrey should wait on him and request him to favour them with a catalogue of suitable books."[i-95] The first order included: Puffendorf's Introduction and Laws of Nature, Hayes upon Fluxions, Keill's Astronomical Lectures, Sidney on Government, Gordon and Trenchard's Cato's Letters, the Spectator, Guardian, Tatler, L'Hospital's Conic Sections, Addison's works, Xenophon's Memorabilia, Palladio, Evelyn, Abridgement of Philosophical Transactions, 'sGravesande's Natural Philosophy, Homer's Odyssey and Iliad, Bayle's Critical Dictionary, and Dryden's Virgil. As a gift Peter Collinson included Newton's Principia in the order. The ancient phalanxes were thoroughly routed! Then there is the MS "List of Books of the Original Philadelphia Library in Franklin's Handwriting"[i-96] which lends recruits to the modern battalions. Included in this list are: Fontenelle on Oracles, Woodward's Natural History of Fossils and Natural History of the Earth, Keill's Examination of Burnet's Theory of the Earth, Memoirs of the Royal Academy of Surgery at Paris, William Petty's Essays, Voltaire's Elements of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy, Halley's Astronomical Tables, Hill's Review of the Works of the Royal Society, Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws, Burlamaqui's Principles of Natural Law and Principles of Politic Law, Bolingbroke's Letters on the Study and Use of History, and Conyer Middleton's Miscellaneous Works. From the volumes owned by the Library Company in 1757 it would have been possible for an alert mind to discover all of the implications, philosophic and religious, of the rationale of science. No less could be found here the political speculations which were later to aid the colonists in unyoking themselves from England. The Library was an arsenal capable of supplying weapons to rationalistic minds intent on besieging the fortress of Calvinism. Defenders of natural rights could find ammunition to wound monarchism; here authors could discover the neoclassic ideals of curiosa felicitas, perspicuity, order, and lucidity reinforced by the emphasis on clarity and correctness sponsored by the Royal Society and inherent in Newtonianism as well as Cartesianism. In short, the volumes contained the ripest fruition of scientific and rationalistic modernity. One can only conjecture the extent to which this library would perplex, astonish, and finally convert men to rationalism and scientific deism, and release them from bondage to throne and altar.
In 1743 Franklin wrote and distributed among his correspondents A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge among the British Plantations in America. From a letter (Feb. 17, 1735/6) of William Douglass, one-time friend of Franklin's brother James, to Cadwallader Colden, we learn that some years before 1736, Colden "proposed the forming a sort of Virtuoso Society or rather Correspondence."[i-97] I. W. Riley suggests that Franklin owes Colden thanks for having stimulated him to form the American Philosophical Society.[i-98] There remains no convincing evidence, however, to disprove A. H. Smyth's observation that Franklin's Proposal "appears to contain the first suggestions, in any public form [editors' italics] for an American Philosophical Society." P. S. Du Ponceau has noted with compelling evidence that the philosophical society formed in 1744 was the direct descendant of Franklin's Junto.[i-99] That in part the Philadelphia Library Company was one of the factors in the formation of the scientific society may be inferred from Franklin's request that it be founded in Philadelphia, which, "having the advantages of a good growing library," can "be the centre of the Society."[i-100] The most important factor, however, was obviously the desire to imitate the forms and ideals of the Royal Society of London. Both societies had as their purpose the improvement of "the common stock of knowledge"; neither was to be provincial or national in interests, but was to have in mind the "benefit of mankind in general." A study of Franklin's Proposal will suggest the purpose of the Royal Society as interpreted by Thomas Sprat:
Their purpose is, in short, to make faithful Records, of all the Works of Nature, or Art, which can come within their reach: that so the present Age, and posterity, may be able to put a mark on the Errors, which have been strengthened by long prescription: to restore the Truths, that have lain neglected: to push on those, which are already known, to more various uses: and to make the way more passable, to what remains unreveal'd.[i-101]
The Royal Society, no less than Franklin's Proposal, stressed the usefulness of its experimentation. Even as it sought "to overcome the mysteries of all the Works of Nature"[i-102] through experimentation and induction, the Baconian empirical method, so Franklin urged the cultivation of "all philosophical experiments that let light into the nature of things, tend to increase the power of man over matter, and multiply the conveniences or pleasures of life."[i-103] Though Franklin may have stopped short of theoretical science,[i-104] he was not only interested in making devices but also in discovering immutable natural laws on which he could base his mechanics for making the world more habitable, less unknown and terrifying. Interpreting natural phenomena in terms of gravity and the laws of electrical attraction and repulsion is to detract from the terror in a universe presided over by a providential Deity, exerting his wrath through portentous comets, "fire-balls flung by an angry God."
Franklin's program is no more miscellaneous, or seemingly pedestrian, than the practices of the Royal Society. As a discoverer of nature's laws and their application to man's use, Franklin, the Newton of electricity, appealed to fact and experiment rather than authority and suggested that education in science may serve, in addition to making the world more comfortable, to make it more habitable and less terrifying. The ideals of scientific research and disinterestedness were dramatized picturesquely by the Tradesman Franklin, who aided the colonist in becoming unafraid.
Although his Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania (1749) furnished the initial suggestion which created the Philadelphia Academy, later the college, and ultimately the University of Pennsylvania, it is easy to overestimate the real significance of Franklin's influence in these schemes unless we remember that political quarrels separated him from those who were nurturing the school in the 1750's. In 1759 Franklin wrote from London to his friend, Professor Kinnersley, concerning the cabal in the Academy against him: "The Trustees have reap'd the full Advantage of my Head, Hands, Heart and Purse, in getting through the first Difficulties of the Design, and when they thought they could do without me, they laid me aside."[i-105] After Franklin failed to secure Samuel Johnson,[i-106] Rev. William Smith was made Provost and Professor of Natural Philosophy of the Academy in 1754. He quoted Franklin as saying that the Academy had become "a narrow, bigoted institution, put into the hands of the Proprietary party as an engine of government."[i-107]
With Milton, Locke, Fordyce, Walker, Rollin, Turnbull, and "some others" as his sources, Franklin adapted the works of these pioneers in education to provincial uses. (One finds it difficult to discover any original ideas in the Proposals.) Like Locke and Milton, he urged that education "supply the succeeding Age with Men qualified to serve the Publick with Honour to themselves, and to their Country."[i-108] Here he was unlike President Clap, who in 1754 explained that "the Original End and design of Colleges was to instruct and train up persons for the Work of the ministry.... The great design of founding this school [Yale] was to educate ministers in our own way."[i-109] As early as 1722, in Dogood Paper No. IV, Franklin caricatured sardonically the narrow theological curriculum of Harvard College.[i-110] Existing for the citizenry rather than the clergy, offering instruction in English as well as Latin and Greek, in mechanics, physical culture, natural history, gardening, mathematics, and arithmetic rather than in sectarian theology, Franklin's Academy was to be more secular and utilitarian than any other school in the provinces. Indeed, Rev. George Whitefield lamented the want of "aliquid Christi" in the curriculum, "to make it as useful as I would desire it might be."
Franklin stressed the need for the acquisition of a clear and concise literary style. He observed: "Reading should also be taught, and pronouncing, properly, distinctly, emphatically; not with an even Tone, which under-does, nor a theatrical, which over-does Nature." Hence he reflected the virtues of neoclassic perspicuity and correctness. (These plans he more fully expressed in his Idea of the English School, published in 1751.) As he grew older he apparently became less tolerant of the teaching of the ancient languages in colonial schools: in Observations Relative to the Intentions of the Original Founders of the Academy of Philadelphia (1789), he charged that the Latin school had swallowed the English and that he was hence "surrounded by the Ghosts of my dear departed Friends, beckoning and urging me to use the only Tongue now left us, in demanding that Justice to our Grandchildren, that our Children has [sic] been denied."[i-111] The Latin and Greek languages he considered "in no other light than as the Chapeau bras of modern Literature."[i-112] Like Emerson's, his opposition was to linguistic study rather than to the classical ideas.
Although he emphasized the study of science and mechanics, it is important to observe that he kept his balance. He warned Miss Mary Stevenson in 1760: "There is... a prudent Moderation to be used in Studies of this kind. The Knowledge of Nature may be ornamental, and it may be useful; but if, to attain an Eminence in that, we neglect the Knowledge and Practice of essential Duties, we deserve Reprehension."[i-113] Not without reserve did he champion the Moderns; remembering several provocative scientific observations in Pliny, he wrote to William Brownrigg (Nov. 7, 1773): "It has been of late too much the mode to slight the learning of the ancients."[i-114] He would not agree with the enthusiastic and trenchant disciple of the moderns, M. Fontenelle, that "We are under an obligation to the ancients for having exhausted almost all the false theories that could be found."[i-115] Although he would agree that the empirical method of acquiring knowledge is more reasonable than authoritarianism reared on syllogistic foundations, and with Cowley that
Bacon has broke that scar-crow Deity ["Authority"],[i-116]
he was not blithely confident that science and the knowledge gained from experimentation would create a more rigorously moral race. He wrote to Priestley in 1782: "I should rejoice much, if I could once more recover the Leisure to search with you into the Works of Nature; I mean the inanimate, not the animate or moral part of them, the more I discover'd of the former, the more I admir'd them; the more I know of the latter, the more I am disgusted with them."[i-117] He often suggested, "As Men grow more enlightened," but seldom did this clause carry more than an intellectual connotation. Progress in knowledge[i-118] did not on the whole suggest to Franklin progress in morals or the general progress of mankind.
Essentially classical in morality, extolling a temperance like that of Xenophon, Epictetus, Cicero, Socrates, and Aristotle, Franklin could not cheerily champion the moderns without serious reservations. Considering only progress in knowledge, man may be considered as pedetentim progredientes, but, Franklin thought, man seemed to have found it easier to conquer lightning than himself. If science and other contemporaneous knowledge detracted from cosmic terror, it did not solve the problem of the mystery of evil and sin: like Shakespeare, Franklin was perplexed by the inexplicability and ruthlessness of Man's potential and actual malevolence.[i-119] Thus in stressing utility and vocational adaptiveness, Franklin did not forget to stress the need for development of character, man's internal self, and here he did not find the ancients dispensable.[i-120] If unlike Socrates in his studies of physical nature, he was like the Athenian gadfly in his quest for moral perfection in the teeth of "perpetual temptation," in his strenuous and sober effort to know himself. Too little attention has been paid Franklin's Hellenic sobriety—even as it has had too meagre an influence. Let Molière challenge, "The ancients are the ancients, we are the people of today"; Franklin, although confident that he could learn more of physical nature from Newton than from Aristotle, was not convinced that the wisdom of Epictetus or the Golden Verses of Pythagoras were less salutary than the wit of his own age. A modern in his confidence in the progress of knowledge, Franklin, approaching the problem of morality, wisely saw the ancients and moderns as complementary. Aware of the continuity of the mind and race, he was not willing to dismiss the ancients as fit to be imitated. Yet he failed to discover in the welter of egoistic men any continuous moral progress, although, unlike the determinists, he thought that the individual could improve himself through self-knowledge and self-control. Unlike contemporary exponents of the "original genius" cult who scorned industrious rational study and conformity, Franklin as an educational theorist was the exponent of reason and of conscious intellectual industry and thrift; he would mediate between the study of nature and of man, and, like Aristotle, he would rely not so much upon individualistic self-expression as upon a purposeful imitation of those men in the past who had led useful and happy lives.