The Society for Useful Knowledge (18 page)

The slim volume,
Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania
, offers a detailed roadmap to the foundation and management of an academy and college. The pamphlet, and several subsequent publications along similar lines, all demonstrate just how much stress Franklin and his fellow leather aprons laid on the value of a practical education, taught in English rather than in the traditional classical languages, and with an emphasis on mathematics, natural philosophy, agronomy, accounting, and mechanics.

“As to their Studies,” Franklin wrote of the incoming students in his
Proposals
, “it would be well if they could be taught
every Thing
that is useful, and
every Thing
that is ornamental. But Art is long, and their Time is short. It is therefore proposed that they learn those Things that are likely to be
most useful
and
most ornamental
, Regard being had to the several Professions for which they are intended.” Toward that end, the proposed curriculum was heavily weighted toward the proper use and understanding of the English language.”
⁸

Addressing the classical tongues, which had formed the basic medium of advanced European education for centuries, Franklin instead emphasized the absolute primacy of English and scientific instruction. Forcing the children of the lower and middling classes to devote the time and expense needed to master Greek and Latin before proceeding with their advanced schooling posed an unreasonable burden and effectively limited access to education.

After all, his own father, Josiah, had balked at the looming costs the family faced with Benjamin's enrollment at the classically oriented Boston Grammar School, and quickly yanked his son from his formal studies. It appears that Franklin may have initially favored a ban on Greek and Latin, reversing himself in the face of opposition from powerful donors and other supporters of the overall plan, and his published proposal accepted with some reluctance their place in the classroom. “And though all should not be compelled to learn Latin, Greek, or the modern foreign Languages; yet none that have an ardent Desire to learn them should be refused; their English, Arithmetic, and other Studies absolutely necessary, being at the same Time not neglected.”
⁹

Leisure time would be best spent attending to practical matters. “While they are reading Natural History, might not a little
Gardening, Planting, Grafting, Inoculating
, &c. be taught and practiced; and now and then Excursions made to the neighboring Plantations of the best Farmers, their Methods observed and reasoned upon for the Information of Youth. The Improvement of Agriculture being useful to all, and Skill in it no Disparagement to any.”
¹⁰

Central to Franklin's vision was a dedicated English School as the central component of the academy. There, the language of everyday American (and British) life was to be given scholarly attention typically reserved for Latin and Greek. Students would address the works of “the best English Authors,” including Milton, Locke, Addison, Pope, and Swift—the very writers that had shaped Franklin as a voracious young reader and an aspiring essayist.
¹¹
The great books of the Ancients would be read in translation, saving students from many years of preparatory language study that could now be devoted to more useful subjects.

The emphasis on the cultivation of practical skills—those of the farmer, the mechanic, the small merchant, the government functionary—echoed the social reformer and Puritan philosopher William Petty's exaltation of the tradesman and the artisan at the expense of those “lazy men in gentlemen's houses” turned out by the universities of seventeenth-century Britain. It also
echoed one of the fundamental laws of William Penn's original colonial project—long since abandoned by Franklin's day—for the mandatory education of the young “so that they may be … taught some useful trade or skill, that the poor may work to live, and the rich if they became poor shall not want.”
¹²

Franklin reckoned that completion of his proposed curriculum would leave graduates well prepared to lead useful and productive lives. “Youth will come out of this School fitted for learning any Business, Calling or Profession, except such wherein Languages are required; and though unacquainted with any ancient or foreign Tongue, they will be Masters of their own, which is of more immediate and general Use.”
¹³

The proposed social basis for the Franklin's new school was also noteworthy, for it was to be under the management of an independent board of trustees, a self-styled “voluntary society of founders,” with no direct reliance on any existing power or institution. Historically, European colleges and universities, and their American imitators, had been founded or controlled by religious orders seeking to train ministers and instruct believers, or by rulers eager to provide skilled workers for their state bureaucracies and to enhance their own prestige.
¹⁴
In contrast to the other colonial institutions of the day—Harvard, William and Mary, Yale, newcomers Princeton and Columbia
^b
—the Philadelphia academy and college was understood from the outset to be nonsectarian, and its program of study made little direct reference to the study of religion in general.

Although the future University of Pennsylvania would remain true to this nondenominational mission, its very creation owed much to the Great Awakening, a wave of grassroots religious sentiment that injected greater participation of the lower and middling classes into organized religion and public life in general. In the South and along the frontier, the movement brought many new believers into the churches. In the Northeast and mid-Atlantic, it mobilized the artisans, the mechanics, and the petty merchants who began to assert themselves at the expense of the wealthy and powerful who dominated America's religious and social institutions. Accompanying this new
social prominence were increasing demands for an education that met their specific needs for useful knowledge and vocational skills, in what amounted to a rebuke to traditional notions of elite schooling.
¹⁵

Franklin had long since left behind any attachment to organized religious practice. This view was bolstered by his own experiences growing up in Puritan-influenced Boston, which he fled at the first opportunity; his youthful romp through London's free-thinking coffeehouses; and then professional and public life in Philadelphia, where he drifted toward the deists and the more independent minded among the Quakers and where he openly clashed with the city's rigid Presbyterian clerics. Toward the end of his days, Franklin used his last major public address to urge ratification of the Constitution of the new United States, a document heavily influenced by deist currents.

Franklin was baptized in Boston, in what later became known as the Congregational Church, a close cousin to the Presbyterians of Philadelphia. But he soon turned his back on many of its central teachings. “Some of the Dogmas of that Persuasion, such as the Eternal Decrees of God, Election, Reprobation, &c. appeared to me unintelligible, others doubtful, and I early absented myself from the Public Assemblies of the Sect, Sunday being my Studying-Day.”
¹⁶

Defending himself in an emotional letter to his parents, who were openly distraught at the idea that their son had forsaken the teachings of his youth, Franklin spelled out the essence of his evolving religious views: “I think vital Religion has always suffered, when Orthodoxy is more regarded than Virtue. And the Scripture assures me, that at the last Day, we shall not be examined what we
thought
, but what we
did;
and our Recommendation will not be that we said
Lord, Lord
, but that we did Good to our Fellow Creatures.”
¹⁷

Yet, Franklin assures us that he was never without religious principles, including firm belief in “the Existence of the Deity, that he made the World, and governed it by his Providence.”
¹⁸
For many years he remained a paid-up member of Philadelphia's Presbyterian congregation although he only rarely attended meetings. He even composed his own “New Version of the Lord's Prayer with Notes,” modernizing the language and accounting for contemporary understandings of religious faith and practice. But Franklin was insistent that religion contribute to the public good in general and not merely to narrow sectarian interests or purely personal needs.

Attempts by the head of Philadelphia's Presbyterian congregation, Jedediah Andrews, to bring Franklin back into the orthodox fold foundered after the latter reluctantly agreed to sit through five consecutive Sundays on a trial basis. “Had he been,
in my Opinion
, a good Preacher perhaps I might have continued. But his Discourses were chiefly either polemic Arguments, or Explications of the peculiar Doctrines of our Sect, and were all to me very dry, uninteresting and unedifying, since not a single moral Principle was inculcated or enforced, their Aim seeming to be rather to make us Presbyterians than good Citizens.”
¹⁹

For Franklin, the chief value of religious practice, whatever the tradition, was the advancement of man's virtue and protection of the weak against the natural, human inclination toward vice. Seen in this way, he argued, religion was positively necessary. “If Men are so wicked as we now see them
with Religion
what would they be if
without it?
” Franklin asked rhetorically in a letter to an unnamed author who had sought his opinion on the matter.
²⁰
He used more colorful language in his
Poor Richard Improved
of 1751 to warn against the dangers of undermining religion: “Talking against Religion is unchaining a Tiger; the Beast let loose may worry his Deliverer.”
²¹

Franklin set aside his general distaste for preachers when it came to George Whitefield, perhaps the most effective evangelist of the Great Awakening, and the two became fast friends and collaborators.
^c
Franklin regularly published Whitefield's best-selling sermons and journals, contributing to the latter's fame and swelling his own coffers at the same time. Whitefield, in return, was more than generous with his fund-raising prowess in support of projects close to Franklin's heart, including the Philadelphia academy and college and the city hospital.
²²

Whitefield never tired of trying to convert Franklin, while the latter was in awe of the preacher's rhetorical skills and his ability to influence public behavior for the better. “It was wonderful to see the Change soon made in the Manners of our Inhabitants,” recalled Franklin, and he compared Whitefield's soaring public oratory to the transporting experience provided by “an excellent Piece of Music.”
²³
At another meeting, a clearly embarrassed Franklin inexplicably found himself emptying his pockets “wholly into the Collector's Dish,
Gold and all,” despite his firm vow in advance not to contribute a penny. A like-minded friend, who had accompanied Franklin that day, avoided the same fate only by virtue of having left his wallet behind.
²⁴

Franklin never succumbed to Whitefield's evangelical entreaties, with their unwavering demands that the Christian first undergo a personal crisis and come face-to-face with sin before breaking through to the promise of salvation. But he and his allies did take advantage of the new space that Whitefield and other revivalist preachers created in the relatively stratified world of Philadelphia society.

The Great Awakening discomfited America's religious elite and it energized workers and artisans in the towns and cities by giving them a greater voice in matters of faith, practice, and the administration of the churches. The movement also exposed deep differences within congregations and often provoked splits into warring factions. Outspoken itinerant preachers, such as the hugely popular Whitefield, further challenged the established clerics and pushed the boundaries of religious debate. Emboldened by the accompanying breakdown in traditional clerical authority, the layman was increasingly empowered to take positions and choose sides.
²⁵

This same activism spilled over into civic life in general, and the leather apron men began to demand greater political and social influence. Fifteen years earlier, Governor William Keith had sought to exploit these same class grievances in his struggle with the proprietary family and its local supporters, a campaign that led directly to the founding of Franklin's Junto. Now, religious turmoil accelerated this trend toward a more inclusive system, a development that would assume its definitive, populist shape in Pennsylvania with the coming of the Revolution and the drafting of the radical provincial constitution. Of course, it helped that Pennsylvania had no established church with which to contend.

At the heart of the Great Awakening was an emphasis on personal religious experience and authentic feeling at the expense of textual or clerical authority. “An increase in speculative knowledge in divinity is not what is … needed by our people,” wrote Jonathan Edwards, Whitefield's fellow preacher and the movement's leading intellectual. “Our people do not so much need to have their heads stored, as their hearts touched.”
²⁶
This paralleled the demands of the leather aprons for a practical education that bypassed received wisdom and rested instead on useful knowledge, common sense, and experimentation. After
all, the motto of the Royal Society of London was
Nullius in verba
—“take no man's word for it!”

Fueled by religious fervor and social activism, the province's artisans, craftsmen, and laborers enthusiastically backed a growing charity schools movement, which had begun in England and Scotland. These institutions, funded by subscription and often built by volunteers, provided for “Instruction of Poor Children gratis, in Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, and the first Principles of Virtue and Piety.”
²⁷