The Society for Useful Knowledge (20 page)

Smith's proposed reorganization of the curriculum, outlined in 1754 in the
American Magazine and Monthly Chronicle
, did not even mention the English School. Rather, he focused all his attention on the classical program.
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Nor did Smith offer any acknowledgement of Franklin's seminal role in the founding of the academy itself and the creation of its first course of study. Perhaps most damaging of all, Smith used the pages of this same short-lived magazine, of which he was the editor, to question Franklin's rightful claim on the electrical discoveries that had won him such fame at home and abroad, ascribing them instead to Ebenezer Kinnersley, then a teacher at the school. Kinnersley, ever loyal to his friend and associate, publically denied the honors and backed Franklin as the leading figure among the Philadelphia electricians, but by then the Smith-Franklin rift was complete.

At the same time, Franklin's increasing involvement in Pennsylvania politics and other projects began to limit his influence at the school. Amid the press of other business, he resigned as board president. In 1757, the Pennsylvania legislature sent him on the first of two lengthy missions to London to negotiate the future governance of the province. Two years later, Franklin was forced to acknowledge that his absence from Philadelphia meant that he was no longer in a position to assist Kinnersley, his fellow electrician, in the teacher's struggles with the college administration, or to defend the principles of practical education.

“Everything to be done in the Academy was privately preconcerted in a Cabal without my Knowledge or Participation and accordingly carried into Execution,” Franklin wrote from London by way of commiseration with his fellow electrician. “The Schemes of Public Parties made it seem requisite to lessen my Influence wherever it could be lessened. The Trustees had reaped 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.”
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Franklin's anger that his educational project had been hijacked never subsided. Toward the very end of his life, back in Philadelphia after his diplomatic triumphs in Paris on behalf of the new United States, he prepared a detailed, six-thousand-word indictment of the trustees. The central fault, he argued in his “Observations Relative to the Intentions of the Original Founders of the Academy in Philadelphia,” completed in the summer of 1789 but never published, lay with those “Persons of Wealth and Learning” who forced him to water down the stress on English instruction in useful knowledge in favor of a traditional program of classical education.
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Despite failing health that often left him bedridden, Franklin painstakingly combed through the minutes of the board over the intervening decades to support his contention that both the letter and the spirit of the academy's original constitutions had been systematically contravened, in violation of promises made to the majority of contributors. As the last of the founders still alive, it was incumbent upon him to try to right the wrongs done to the institution and its fundamental ideals. “I seem here to be 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 Grand children that our Children have been denied.”
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Franklin acknowledged that he, too, had made mistakes. He unwisely permitted a number of the trustees' initial moves against the English School to go on unchecked when it might still have been in his power to reverse them. The essay also betrays a separate note of bitterness that his tireless diplomatic efforts abroad on behalf of the new nation had not received the public recognition he felt was his due.

Franklin's contributions to the future direction of American education, however, should not be slighted by his self-professed failure to realize the radical vision of the original Philadelphia academy. True, he had allowed himself to get entangled in personal disputes with William Smith. This had hindered his ability to lobby effectively for the so-called English program and related educational reform, and to ensure the productive education of lower- and middle-class students. Likewise, his political activism in the province further undercut these efforts by setting him against the establishment figures on the board, whose cooperation on educational matters he needed.

Yet the institution he left behind remained true throughout its history to its nonsectarian roots; unique among the colleges of the day, it was never under the direct influence of any single denomination. From the outset, it offered the nation's most progressive program of mathematical and scientific studies and paid great attention to the study of the English language, putting it decades ahead of the other colonial institutions of higher education.
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One hundred years later, Franklin's impulse toward useful education was reinvigorated with the foundation of America's great land-grant universities, created under the federal Morrill Act of 1862 to provide training in agriculture and the mechanical arts “to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.”
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Franklin's political mission to London, beginning in 1757, cost him what little remained of his influence at the Philadelphia academy, but he could still actively promote practical education and the movement for useful knowledge in the American colonies. The move to England and subsequent travels around the country and on the Continent allowed him to meet for the first time many of the European virtuosi, including Peter Collinson, with whom he had built up a steady correspondence over the years. The scientific fame surrounding his electrical experiments and invention of the lightning rod gave Franklin easy access to the upper echelons of British society and opened
doors to the most interesting intellectual circles, coffeehouse clubs, and political discussion groups.

His successful navigation of the social networks that spanned the intimate world of European science provided an important channel by which the latest thinking on experimentation and useful knowledge could penetrate the American colonies. Among the beneficiaries of Franklin's knowledge and contacts was Benjamin Rush, fresh from medical studies at the University of Edinburg and in London to attend scientific lectures and visit the local hospitals.

It is easy to see why Franklin would take to the young American, whose social background, education, and enthusiasm for experimental science complemented his own experience, ideas, and values. For the rest of his life, he would continue to act as mentor, promoter, and a source of patronage and outright financial support for Rush and others like him.

The son of a Philadelphia gunsmith with family roots among the early Puritans and Quakers, Rush attended the rural West Nottingham Academy, one of the so-called log colleges in New Jersey. The schoolmaster Samuel Finley, who was Rush's uncle, integrated animal husbandry and other aspects of outdoor life with more traditional subjects. “All his scholars shared in the labors of harvest and hay-making.… These exercises were both pleasant and useful. They conduced to health, and helped to implant more deeply in our minds the native passion for rural life,” Rush later recalled fondly, despite a lasting scar on one hand from a schoolboy accident with farm machinery.
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The academy's pedagogical philosophy was largely a conservative one, but it did place particular emphasis on the English language and on the study of arithmetic, geography, and geometry. As schoolmaster, Finley instilled in his students strong notions of public service, temperance, and modesty, and he steered Rush away from “the temptations” of a career in law and toward a more useful vocation as a physician and, later, a professor of medicine.
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“I might have acquired more fortune and rank in life in the profession of law … but I am sure I have been more useful in the latter profession.”
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Rush left the academy for Princeton and completed his undergraduate degree in 1760. He then returned to Philadelphia where he apprenticed himself to a local physician—typical practice for an aspiring colonial doctor—and attended lectures at the Pennsylvania Hospital. But by his own account, his true education only began with his arrival in 1766 in the cosmopolitan world of
Edinburgh, then in the powerful grip of Enlightenment ideas on the place of human reason in science, society, politics, and religion.

This was the Scotland of the skeptic David Hume, the political economist Adam Smith, and many other eighteenth-century luminaries of philosophy, experimental science, and invention. Rush, whose great-great-grandfather led a cavalry force under English revolutionary Oliver Cromwell, was also exposed to radical republicanism by a fellow descendant of a Puritan commander. These heady experiences helped set the American on a course that would make him one of the leading colonial voices for both useful knowledge and the revolt against the British monarchy. He would also go on to make original contributions to medical education and to the new field of psychiatry. “The two years I spent in Edinburgh I consider as the most important in their influence on my character and conduct of any period of my life,” Rush records in his memoirs.
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This European sojourn included periodic visits to Franklin, who introduced Rush to London's intellectual world. He had dinner with Samuel Johnson (the famed lexicographer), met one of Cromwell's great-grandsons, and found his way into one of the city's leading literary circles, “a kind of Coffee house for authors.” Franklin also provided his countryman with a much-needed loan and letters of introduction to his scientific contacts in Paris, including the French electrician Nollet, with whom he had now reconciled. Throughout his time in London, Rush took in the public attractions, attended the odd theater performance, and paid special interest to the city's burgeoning industrial enterprises. “I … visited most of the large and curious manufactories that were carried on in London, and wrote down descriptions of them.”
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Rush returned to his hometown in 1769 at the age of twenty-four and opened a modest medical practice, initially serving indigent patients ignored by his fellow physicians before slowly expanding his business to include paying clients drawn by word of mouth. He was also named the first professor of chemistry at the Philadelphia college, founded by his mentor Franklin twenty years earlier, and joined a scientific circle that had grown out of Franklin's American Philosophical Society.

Philadelphia was already astir with anti-British sentiment. Rush's university days in Edinburgh had forced him to “exercise my reason upon the subject of government,” and he soon concluded that “no form of government can be rational, but that which is derived from the suffrages of the people who are subjects of it.”
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He found some sympathy for his radical republican views
among the Philadelphia branch of the clandestine Sons of Liberty, a colonial movement to resist Britain's increasingly harsh tax and trade policies.

Benjamin Rush was also among the first of the American revolutionaries to realize fully that a successful break with England would also entail a knowledge revolution, one that would immediately apply the latest scientific findings in botany, chemistry, mineralogy, and the like to uncovering the country's full potential in agriculture, industry, and trade. This sense of urgency lay behind Rush's lifelong campaigns against the study of Greek and Latin in America's schools and colleges.
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As Rush no doubt had suspected, the social, political, and economic upheaval that accompanied the Revolution provided a boost to the American movement for useful knowledge. Faced with the enormous challenges of battling the global superpower of the day, the colonists found that traditional learning was not the best preparation for armed rebellion in the face of vastly superior economic and military force. “In these times of action, classical education was found of less service than good natural parts, guided by common sense, and sound judgment,” David Ramsay of South Carolina, one of the war's earliest historians, wrote in 1789. “It seemed as if war not only required, but created talents.”
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Thomas Paine, a close associate of Rush, Franklin, and other campaigners for practical education, famously elevated the notion of “common sense” to a revolutionary doctrine with the publication in early 1776 of his inflammatory pamphlet of the same name—perhaps the single most influential text in the history of American letters.
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Franklin, a talent spotter of the first order, had successfully encouraged Paine, a corset maker by trade, to emigrate from his native England two years earlier. Now, Paine's proffer of “nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense” in support of his contention that America must now throw off British rule and create a representative government pushed public opinion toward outright independence at a time when many colonists were ambivalent about so drastic a course.

By eschewing the ponderous classical references that characterized the political language of the day,
Common Sense
spoke directly to the American people in unaccustomed ways, and to unprecedented effect.
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Paine's essay also tapped
into the colonists' predominant religious idiom, that of Protestant dissent shared by such disparate communities as the Puritans and the Quakers, the German sectaries, and the New Light Calvinists of the Middle Colonies, as a way of undermining the legitimacy of both the British king and breaking with British notions of political liberty.
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For Paine, as for Franklin, Jefferson, Rush, and the other founders of the republic, the rights of the people rested on a self-evident foundation, validated not by any British or ancient authority but by common sense. Education in the new nation would need to help clear away the dead weight of tradition. In later writings, Paine argued that persistent reliance in the schools on Latin and Greek was calculated to advance the interests of a corrupt church and an illegitimate state.
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By looking backward to antiquity for inspiration and channeling scientific and philosophical ideas through the medium of dead languages, the forces of reaction retained their grip on power.