Benjamin Franklin : $b Representative selections, with introduction, bibliograpy, and notesFranklin, Benjamin
General
Benjamin Franklin : $b Representative selections, with introduction, bibliograpy, and notes
Franklin, Benjamin
Franklin, Benjamin, 1706-1790
Although his _Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in
Pensilvania_ (1749) furnished the initial suggestion which created the
Philadelphia Academy, later the college, and ultimately the University
of Pennsylvania, it is easy to overestimate the real significance of
Franklin's influence in these schemes unless we remember that political
quarrels separated him from those who were nurturing the school in the
1750's. In 1759 Franklin wrote from London to his friend, Professor
Kinnersley, concerning the cabal in the Academy against him: "The
Trustees have reap'd 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."[i-105]
After Franklin failed to secure Samuel Johnson,[i-106] Rev. William
Smith was made Provost and Professor of Natural Philosophy of the
Academy in 1754. He quoted Franklin as saying that the Academy had
become "a narrow, bigoted institution, put into the hands of the
Proprietary party as an engine of government."[i-107]
With Milton, Locke, Fordyce, Walker, Rollin, Turnbull, and "some
others" as his sources, Franklin adapted the works of these pioneers in
education to provincial uses. (One finds it difficult to discover any
original ideas in the _Proposals_.) Like Locke and Milton, he urged that
education "supply the succeeding Age with Men qualified to serve the
Publick with Honour to themselves, and to their Country."[i-108] Here he
was unlike President Clap, who in 1754 explained that "the Original End
and design of Colleges was to instruct and train up persons for the Work
of the ministry.... The great design of founding this school [Yale] was
to educate ministers in our own way."[i-109] As early as 1722, in
_Dogood Paper_ No. IV, Franklin caricatured sardonically the narrow
theological curriculum of Harvard College.[i-110] Existing for the
citizenry rather than the clergy, offering instruction in English as
well as Latin and Greek, in mechanics, physical culture, natural
history, gardening, mathematics, and arithmetic rather than in sectarian
theology, Franklin's Academy was to be more secular and utilitarian than
any other school in the provinces. Indeed, Rev. George Whitefield
lamented the want of "_aliquid Christi_" in the curriculum, "to make it
as useful as I would desire it might be."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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