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197 7 Schools, Schoolteachers, and Schoolchildren By 1730, Benjamin Franklin had long since finished his formal education, and his experiences form a backdrop to those of the other learners discussed in this chapter. Born in 1706, the same year as Cotton Mather’s younger son Samuel, Franklin had served only part of his apprenticeship as a printer with his half-brother James before he smuggled himself out of his home town, Boston, to escape from the apprenticeship. He had then worked as a printer in Philadelphia and, for two years, in London, and in 1730 he was about to become the owner and editor of the Philadelphia Gazette. Under his insightful and frugal management, the newspaper would be a commercial success. Franklin provides what is perhaps the eighteenth century’s most vivid example of the brief and interrupted schooling that was available to most children in the early decades, and yet Franklin’s story reveals how much could be wrung from that education by someone with his ingenuity and perseverance. Scholars have often extolled Franklin as the archetypal self-made man, but it is important to note that the formal aspects of his early education, which he recounts in detail in his Autobiography and which totaled perhaps four years of noncontinuous schooling, gave him the tools to teach himself. In a busy Boston household bursting with children, Benjamin, the youngest son in a family of seventeen children, stood out for his quickness in learning to read. He accomplished it so early that, he said, “I do not remember when I could not read.” He may well have first learned at home from his siblings before attending Sarah Kemble Knight’s little reading school, which Sammy Mather also attended.1 Although all of Franklin’s brothers had been apprenticed to various trades, Franklin’s intelligence convinced his father, a devout Congregationalist, that this son should be educated for the church. When Franklin was eight years old, therefore, his father, Josiah Franklin, sent him to one of Boston’s two free grammar schools. He did well there, rising in just under a year from the middle of the class to its head. As Josiah looked ahead, however, to the expenses of college and the poor salaries of the college-educated, he changed his mind, removed his son from the grammar school, and sent him instead to “a School for Writing & Arithmetic.” It was “kept by a then famous Man, Mr Geo[rge] Brownell,” Franklin recalled, “very successful in his Profession generally, and that by mild, encouraging Methods .” Under Brownell’s kindly regime, Franklin “acquired fair Writing pretty soon,” but made no progress in arithmetic. When Franklin was ten his father 198 Decades of Transition, 1730 to 1750 removed him from this school, too, to assist him with his trade of candle and soap making.2 The single most important feature of Franklin’s education, once his formal schooling ended, was his determination to read as much and as widely as possible. His father’s library, in Franklin’s view, was far too narrowly focused on books of “polemic Divinity.” It did include Plutarch’s Lives, Daniel Defoe’s Essay on Projects, and Cotton Mather’s Bonifacius: An Essay upon the Good, the last two of which “perhaps,” Franklin says, “gave me a Turn of Thinking that had an Influence on some of the principal future Events of my Life.” Franklin read most of the theological works anyway, but he often regretted that “at a time when I had such a Thirst for Knowledge, more proper Books had not fallen in my Way.”3 His love of reading, which of course was aided by his precocious skill at it, made book ownership a priority, and he spent any money he acquired as a child on purchasing books. He had enjoyed John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (one of the few books that adults encouraged children to read that had a plot and adventures), so his first purchase was of Bunyan’s works “in separate little Volumes” (clearly chapman’s books). He sold these in order to finance his purchase of Richard Burton’s Historical Collections, “small Chapmen’s Books, 40 or 50 in all.” His reading of these cheap little booklets from the chapman subculture, aimed not at children but adults, highlights the lack of appropriate secular reading material for children in the second decade of the eighteenth century.4 At the age of twelve, Franklin was contracted to serve his half...

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