Hating School: Benjamin Franklin on the Possibilities of American Education

• In Event: Education, Commerce, and Democracy

Abstract

Today, we take universal public education for granted in liberal democracies. But the liberal pedagogies that early Americans inherited from Europeans like John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau were at best skeptical of institutional education, if not vehemently opposed to it. For them, education at home by parents or tutors was a superior alternative. Yet despite being careful readers of these philosophers, Americans from the outset embraced institutional schooling as the best educational hope for the new republic. To see how we got from Locke’s and Rousseau’s skepticism of school to our present embrace of it, this paper examines the writings of one of the nation’s most influential early pedagogues, Benjamin Franklin.

Franklin’s public writings, from his Silence Dogood letters to his Autobiography, often disparage educational institutions and celebrate his own enterprising auto-didacticism. I show how Franklin used his Autobiography to demonstrate how a liberal form of anti-institutional self-education could be undertaken in a democratic society, even by the poor, and how he saw this education as a hedge against the dangers of institutional schooling – especially intellectual conformism and slavish esteem-seeking – that Locke and Rousseau feared. Self-education became, in Franklin’s hands, the democratic analogue of aristocratic tutorial education in Locke and Rousseau. Thus, while admitting the necessity of schooling, he maintained what would become a distinctly American skepticism of it, and offered readers of his Autobiography means to both accept its necessity and circumvent its damaging effects. Franklin’s self-education was grounded on two pillars that he painstakingly acquired and cultivated throughout his childhood and early adulthood: self-discipline, particularly with respect to assiduously setting aside time and money for study, and like-minded friends. These supports together formed a substitute for a Lockean tutor, but obtaining them proved one of the major challenges of Franklin’s early life and his instructions for their acquisition make up much of the first two parts of the Autobiography.

Nonetheless, in his life, he worked assiduously to found, fund, and propagate schools. How can we reconcile these two apparently opposed aims? In the second half of the paper, I argue that Franklin understood the dangers to liberty from institutional schooling that Locke and Rousseau diagnosed, but he also understood the dangers to children arising from the particular democratic context of the American colonies: a shortage of money and time on the part of families to educate their children privately resulted in the great freedom of young boys to educate themselves, by means of work, play, and, if they could manage it, self-study. The dark side of this freedom was a dangerous lack of discipline and an early exposure to temptations that ruined some of Franklin’s promising friends. Schooling offered a solution to this distinctly democratic dilemma, but one that Franklin accepted ambivalently.

How can these two sides of Franklin – the school-hater and the school-builder – be reconciled? Franklin’s proposed school was a minimal affair, but that was the point. It was sufficient for two essential things – it provided reliable adult supervision for the young through their adolescence, and it gave them the foundations for further learning, and only the foundations. In dispensing with religious instruction and the whole apparatus of European liberal learning, Franklin removed from the school its capacity to inculcate an entire worldview and way of life, that of the sectarian gentleman. That would have to be obtained elsewhere, and the Autobiography illustrates what other avenues for that education Franklin preferred. Franklin thus democratized Locke’s entirely individualized liberal education by removing tutors and introducing friends in their place, but, realizing that this was not reliable enough for the nation’s needs, borrowed from the republic tradition of public schooling as well.
Franklin’s compromise was to accept the country’s need for schools, even to promote and build such schools, but to deny that most of education would take place in them. Education would become what occurs outside of and even against school; it would remain, in this sense, self-education. This dichotomy between the grudging necessity of institutional schooling and the transformative (anti-institutional) process of education has become the literary template for American coming of age, informing a long tradition of ambivalent depictions of schools, from such disparate sources as Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, and Henry Adams to the twentieth-century teen films of John Hughes. Franklin was the first to set out this irreverent American attitude towards schooling, with lasting consequences for the organization of our educational system and our expectations of children as rebellious students.

Author

• Rita Koganzon, University of North Carolina