The Society for Useful Knowledge (19 page)

A circle of mechanics began to build one such school in Philadelphia. Commonly known as the New Building, it would also double as a large auditorium for visiting preachers, such as Whitefield, who were either too controversial, too popular, or both, to be accommodated in Philadelphia's existing churches. “Both House and Ground were … expressly for the Use of any Preacher of any religious Persuasion who might desire to say something to the People of Philadelphia,” Franklin claimed years later with some exaggeration, “the Design in building not being to accommodate any particular Sect, but the Inhabitants in general, so that even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a Missionary to preach Mahometanism to us,
^d
he would find a Pulpit at his Service.”
²⁸

A special committee of trustees, consisting of two carpenters, a bricklayer, and a weaver, managed the construction, while a second body, made up of Whitefield, several merchants, and a shoemaker, were to see to it that the school's charitable mission was fulfilled. Another charity school project, led by local coal miners, began to take shape in Bristol, Pennsylvania, about twenty miles northeast of Philadelphia.
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Gradually, the religious enthusiasm of the Great Awakening eased into remission. The itinerant Whitefield, busy raising funds for an orphanage in Georgia, began to spend less and less time in Philadelphia, although he did preach a memorable sermon in the future school and auditorium, its unfinished walls reaching only to his shoulders. Its star attraction largely absent, the complex gradually fell into disuse, its educational programs largely abandoned.

It remained so until Franklin and his backers, primarily his fellow artisans and mechanics, stepped forward to pay off the project's debts and convert the
structure into classrooms for the new Philadelphia academy, which would absorb the charity school and set aside a certain number of places for the indigent. “The Care and Trouble of agreeing with the Workmen, purchasing Materials, and superintending the Work fell upon me, and I went through it the more cheerfully, as it did not then interfere with my private Business,” the management of which Franklin had already entrusted to his partner, the printer David Hall.
³⁰

Having readied the classrooms, the mechanics, artisans, and craftsmen enjoyed less success in establishing their desired curriculum, grounded in useful knowledge and practical training, at the heart of the new academy and college. Between the presentation of these ideas in
Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania
and the opening of the school, much of the novelty and power of the Franklin scheme was eroded by opposition from social conservatives and other traditionalists.

This largely reflected the composition of the board of trustees, controlled by what Franklin, who never shed his strong class identification with the leather apron men, later referred to as a cabal of “the principal Gentlemen of the Province.”
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Schooling in Greek and Latin was still seen in both Europe and America as the mark of a true gentleman, and the powerful figures who dominated the board—founding members included Philadelphia's richest businessman, the mayor and several of his predecessors, city councilmen, and the province's chief justice—were determined that their own offspring should receive a fitting classical education in the new academy.
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Furthermore, the creation of a cohort of educated tradesmen and other middling sorts, who might then be better positioned to demand a real say in provincial affairs, held little appeal to the majority of board members.

These same artisans had taken the lead in the planning, construction, and early financing of the provincial academy. Franklin's innovative educational program had generated considerable excitement among a wide swath of Pennsylvania society, including workers and mechanics, many of whom responded enthusiastically with pledges of financial support for his explicit notion of a practical education. The project also garnered backing among members of Franklin's expanding circle of European virtuosi, eager to inculcate their experimental philosophy in young New World minds.

However, conservative local notables wound up with most of the twenty-four seats on the school's board of trustees, reflecting their influence and
connections to the world of provincial politics and business. Franklin and his old Junto partner Philip Syng were the only artisans to obtain seats on the board, although Franklin's prowess in public advocacy secured him the relatively weak position of board president. The board assigned Tench Francis, the province's attorney general, to work with Franklin in drawing up bylaws for the new institution, and at a meeting on November 13, 1749, the trustees approved the formal “Constitutions for a Public Academy in the City of Philadelphia.”

These bylaws set aside many of Franklin's progressive precepts and gave clear precedence to the teaching of the Latin and Greek, with the study of English relegated to a subordinate position. Day-to-day authority for running the school was assigned to the Latin master. He was to be paid twice as much as the English master and to be responsible for the instruction of only half as many students. Over time, the trustees lost interest in the English program and shirked their duties toward its students and faculty; they even attempted to abandon it altogether in 1769 but were forced to reverse the decision after a close reading of their own bylaws, which mandated that such instruction be offered by the institution.

Despite these headwinds, Franklin immersed himself in the project throughout much of the 1750s. He further refined his thinking on education, set forth in the
Idea of the English School
, and he engaged in a furious effort to persuade the respected American clergyman Samuel Johnson (not the great English lexicographer and essayist of the same name) to run the new academy. Johnson declined the offer and later became the first president of King's College, in New York, but not before he had delivered high praise for Franklin's ideas. “Nobody would imagine that the draft you have made for an English education was done by a Tradesman.” There was little, he noted graciously, that he would add to Franklin's proposed curriculum by way of improvement.
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In a notice in the
New York Gazette
of June 3, 1754, Johnson publicly endorsed Franklin's philosophy of education and laid out very similar thinking in his own aspirations for the new King's College: in addition to the classical languages, students would learn “the arts of
numbering
and
measuring;
of
Surveying
and
Navigation
, of
Geography
and
History
, of
Husbandry, Commerce
and
Government
, and in the Knowledge of
all nature
in the
Heavens
above us, and in the
Air, Earth
and
Water
around us, and the various kinds of
Meteors, Stones, Mines
and
Minerals, Plants
and
Animals
, and of Every Thing
useful
for the Comfort, Convenience and Elegance of Life, in the chief
Manufactures
relating to any of these Things.”
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Franklin also worked hard to protect the day-to-day interests of the English and science programs from the hostility of the board. He arranged for a majority of the funds first set aside for school materials to be spent on “mathematical and philosophical” apparatus ordered from London through his primary contact Collinson. And he seems to have been behind a successful effort to increase the pay for the English master, although it remained considerably less than that of the chief Latin instructor.
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Franklin saw to it that his fellow Junto member, the mathematician Theophilus Grew, and his old partner in the electrical experiments and public lecture series, Ebenezer Kinnersley, both joined the faculty, giving considerable heft to the school's teaching of science.

Most significant for the future course of the institution, Franklin successfully recruited the ambitious clergyman William Smith to teach a course in logic, rhetoric, ethics, and natural philosophy. With Franklin's blessing, Smith soon assumed the top administrative job as provost and ushered in the promotion of the academy to the formal rank of a college, allowing it to grant degrees. Smith would remain the driving force at what was now formally known as the College, Academy and Charitable School of Philadelphia in the Province of Pennsylvania for almost twenty-five years.

Educated in Aberdeen and ordained in the Anglican Church, Smith first caught Franklin's eye with his own tract,
A General Idea of the College of Mirania
, which presented the fictional province of Mirania as a vehicle for his progressive views on schooling. The twenty-six-year-old Smith, a private tutor on Long Island, had formulated the ideas contained in the essay as part of his own campaign to be named president of King's College and to shape its curriculum, then in its final planning stages.

When that failed to pan out, he turned his attention to the Philadelphia academy and even enrolled the two wealthy boys under his charge in the new school. He then set out to woo Franklin and he included in his pamphlet hearty praise for Franklin's own ideas. Smith even sent Franklin a personal copy on the very first day of publication.
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Flattery aside, Franklin must have felt that he had found both a kindred spirit and the ideal candidate to manage the academy, although it still took several years to round up the financial and institutional support required to complete the appointment.

As Franklin recognized, Smith's utopian College of Mirania was a direct attack on traditional educational practice. “We must not then … wilder
[bewilder] ourselves in the Search of Truth, among the Rabbis, Commentators and Schoolmen,” wrote Smith, in the voice of his fictional narrator Evander. “Nor in the more refined Speculations of modern Metaphysicians concerning Spirit, Matter, &c., nor yet in the polemic Writings about Grace, Predestination, moral Agency, the Trinity, &c. &c. which so inflame the World at this Day.” Rather, the goal was to turn out “better Men and Citizens.”
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Toward this end, Smith's idealized college offered two distinct tracks, one for students preparing for divinity, law, or medicine, and one for “those designed for Mechanic Professions,” each with its own plan of education. This latter Mechanics School “is so much like the English School in
Philadelphia
, first sketched out by the very ingenious and worthy
Mr. Franklin
.”
³⁸
Among the other innovations the two men endorsed were an emphasis on the English language—“taught grammatically, and as a Language, with Writing”—as well as the general exclusion of outright religious instruction and the pursuit of “Accounts, Mathematics, Ethics, Oratory, Chronology, History, the most plain and useful Parts of natural and mechanic Philosophy … to which is added something of Husbandry and Chemistry.”
³⁹

By almost any standard, Smith's long tenure at the head of the Philadelphia academy should be considered a success. He oversaw its swift advance to the thin ranks of colonial colleges in 1755, introduced medical education in 1765, and established the institution as a university six years later. Early on, he implemented an ambitious new curriculum, one that mirrored many of the reforms he had witnessed in his own university days in Aberdeen. There, much of the medieval Scholastic tradition had been jettisoned to make way for the study of chemistry, natural history, and other aspects of natural philosophy.
⁴⁰

Smith's three-year program of study—a fourth college year was added later to American higher education—allocated one third of the coursework to mathematics and science, one third to the classics, and a like amount to logic, ethics, metaphysics, and oratory.
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The central emphasis, wrote Smith in his formal proposal to the trustees, was on “Thinking, Writing and Acting well, which is the grand aim of a liberal education.” Time would be set aside at the end of each of the year's three terms “for recreation, or bringing up slower geniuses.”
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Even when it came to his beloved classical languages, Smith was prepared to address Franklin's concerns by casting them simply as tools for advanced
learning and not as ends in themselves. Latin and Greek, he acknowledged in one of his college sermons, were to be seen “rather as an Instrument or Means of science, than a Branch thereof.”
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Smith also became an early and enthusiastic member of the American Philosophical Society, and many of his ideas owed no less to Francis Bacon and the Royal Society than did those entertained by Franklin. At his very first commencement as provost in 1757, Smith appealed to the college's benefactors and assembled guests on behalf of both the new graduates and their successors: “I beseech you, let their minds be seasoned with useful knowledge.”
⁴⁴

In Franklin's eyes, however, Smith's tenure at the head of the school—
his
school—was little short of disaster. He was particularly bitter over what he saw as ill treatment of the English curriculum and its intended audience of students from the lower and middle classes. Not long after Smith's arrival in Philadelphia, the provost's social and political ambitions led to increasingly close collaboration with Thomas Penn, Franklin's great adversary, and Smith's support for the so-called proprietary faction put him at odds with the concerns of the Leather Apron Club and their supporters among the other artisans, the petty merchants, and the more progressive Quakers.

Finding himself in a natural alliance with Pennsylvania's ruling elite, who shared his own taste for the classics, Smith began to shed his public enthusiasm for Franklin's English School. Over time, funding levels for the English-language program dropped, enrollment suffered, and the best of the faculty, including Franklin's scientifically-minded allies, began to slip away or were forced to leave.