Silence Dogood on Education

Franklin realizes the importance that readers attribute to the background of an author, especially for periodicals such as his New-England Courant. For this reason, he creates a pseudonym, Silence Dogood, with a biography constructed to appeal to a wide array of readers and hold authority in many realms; Dogood has lost his father, been exposed to poverty as well as religion, gained an education from books, and painted himself as a level headed figure. Thus, Dogood sets himself up well to make his first argument about education.

He begins by stating that in order to gain admission to an institution, one must have wealth or the favor of the wealthy: “the passage was kept by two sturdy porters named Riches and Poverty, and the latter obstinately refused to give Entrance to any who had not first gain’d the Favor of the former.” This statement does not hold as true today with things like financial aid, however the remainder of Franklin’s points could not apply more to modern institutions. He continues on to say that procrastination makes a poor scholar and that such students often seek the help of those who have “got up before them”. Franklin, a largely self-taught man, believes that education is what you make of it, saying that people who go to learning institutions just because they can afford it will likely learn little more than how to get through the system if they lack self-motivation. He concludes the dream by stating that it “was a lively representation of Harvard College.”

Franklin clearly harbors distain for those who put on the air of intelligence simply because they can afford it, rather than because they were interested to learn. It would seem that he, like other enlightenment thinkers, would also be put off by people who try to make themselves sound more intelligent by using a different language or more complex words. However he reveres knowledge of other languages in Silence Dogood No. 4: “acqui’d so much learning as to distinguish them from English. Perhaps Franklin sees a utility in foreign languages, such as being able to bounce ideas off of a larger audience.

We can be sure that Franklin must have carefully constructed this “dream” of Dogood’s, just as he constructed his pseudonym, due to the amount of specific imagery that it contains with meaning. It’s likely that the readers took the tale as fiction as well because of Dogood’s somewhat humorously placed allusion to The New-England Courant. If Franklin believed the personal character of an author to be so important to readers, he must have felt confident that they would not question the reliability of his narrator, Silence Dogood.