Franklin's Education

After reading Franklin’s ideas about how a formal education should be set up, as well as his account of his own education, I thought it would be interesting to compare Franklin’s primarily self-taught education to the system he proposes in “Idea of the English School.” Franklin learned to read at a very young age, and starting at the age of eight he spent two years in school, one of them in a grammar school and the other in a school which taught writing and arithmetic. He doesn’t explain in detail what he learned there, other than that he acquired decent writing skills and made no progress with arithmetic. Other than learning good grammar and spelling from his apprenticeship with his brother in the printing house, he didn’t start his real education until a few years later. This corresponds to the first class in Franklin’s proposed school, which primarily taught English grammar rules, with a particular emphasis on spelling.

Franklin was in the habit of having discussions with his friend Collins, and at one point he was writing a series of letters back and forth to Collins in which they were arguing about women’s education. His father saw the letters, and told Franklin that his writing style left a lot to be desired, so Franklin started to teach himself better style. He did this by imitating the writing in The Spectator (interestingly, Franklin suggests reading The Spectator several times throughout the six courses in his education system). After this, he looked into a lot of books which taught him rhetoric and logic skills. During this whole time, Franklin was also reading many of the great English authors. This stage in his learning corresponds to classes two through four, in which Franklin proposes that boys should be taught to read with attention, study rhetoric, and then start trying their hand at composition.

When he was sixteen, Franklin published his first series of essays: the Silence Dogood letters. This is like the fifth class of his proposed education system, where the boys are encouraged to start writing essays of their own. After that, Franklin continued his studies by reading as many books as he could for the rest of his life, similar to the sixth and last class of his proposed school where the boys must read all the great English authors, such as Milton, Addison, Pope, and Swift, as well as translations of great classics. This part of the education Franklin followed until the end of his life.

I thought it was interesting that Franklin based his formal education system so much on his own self education, but it obviously worked very well for Franklin so maybe his proposed system is a good one.

Learning English

In reading Franklin's "Idea of the English School", I was interested for a couple of reasons. It was fascinating for me to see how far the English language had come by that time and actually how consistent it is with the way we learn English growing up today.

The first reason why Franklin's "Idea of the English School" was interesting to me was because of just how far the English language had come at that point. Being also in a class which focuses on Chaucer, it is frequently brought up that at the time Chaucer was writing, English was not the forefront literary language in England. As a result of the Norman conquest of England, French was the dominant literary language of the time, and Latin the language of the Church. However, this slowly but surely changed with writers such as Chaucer and Thomas Malory writing in Middle English. Though it is centuries later, to see Franklin putting such an emphasis on the learning of the English language, and the progression of English's importance from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment to modern times is amazing.

Geoffrey Chaucer

The second thing that I noticed about this piece of Franklin's work is how similar it is to the way we learn English today. We begin by learning basic rules of grammar and how to spell at our earliest ages, reading very simple texts to get us started. As we get a more solid grasp of the language, we move on to learn how to read properly, actually learning to comprehend the words as we read them. This process continues until we can effectively express in writing and articulate our feelings in speech. It was interesting for me to see how a system Ben Franklin wrote about is still more or less in place after a little over two and a half centuries. Of course, I doubt even Franklin could have predicted how much English would have grown and spread from his day to now.

One last thing I enjoyed about Franklin's "Idea of the English School" was that it returned us to the side of Franklin who puts great importance on education, such as we saw in some earlier writings this year. Though it is interesting to see Franklin's political works, whether it be "The Speech of Ms. Polly Baker" or "Rattle-Snakes for Felons", it is also refreshing to see works on education, especially works which still have an importance today.