printer's trade. In this apprenticeship he continued till he was seventeen years old. From his infancy, he says that he was passionately fond of reading, and spent all the money he could get for books. The books he read during these years of apprenticeship were his real teachers. The important ones were: Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Burton's Historical Collections, Plutarch's Lives, Defoe's An Essay on Projects, Cotton Mather's An Essay to do Good, Addison's Spectator, Cocker's Arithmetic, Seller & Sturny's Navigation, Locke's Human Understanding, the Port Royal Art of Thinking, Greenwood's English Grammar, Xenophon's Memorable Things of Socrates, Tryon on Vegetable Diet, Shaftesbury, Collins. He also says that his father often had some sensible friend or neighbor at the table to converse with and took care to have the conversation turn upon useful topics to improve the minds of his children, and in this way taught them what was good, and just, and prudent in the conduct of life. By conversing, disputing, arguing, and debating with another bookish lad he was led to inform himself on various topics, and by writing out his arguments to improve his style. At this time a volume of Addison's Spectator

2

fell into his hands and became at once his master and instructor in composition. He wrote poems and sketches for his brother's paper, and in this way gained some confidence in his ability to write. Then followed a year in New York City in the printer's business, where he formed the acquaintance of a group of young people who were lovers of reading, with whom he spent his evenings.1 The next eighteen months he spent in London, where, aside from his business, he attended plays and read books, thereby increasing his knowledge. Then he went to Philadelphia, where he made his home for life, except during the years of public service abroad, and there continued the same methods of education, and added to them the famous Junto, a literary and debating club, organized for the mutual improvement of Franklin and a few favorite acquaintances. There they discussed questions of morals, politics, philosophy, poetry, history, and science. This, then, was the training he had for the social, literary, and political life which he lived so intensely and with such great blessing to mankind. His was a school in which he was both master and student he found the subject-matter and determined the

1 Sparks, Life of Franklin, Chap. II. 2 Ibid., Chap. III.

method. It was an education for life. By reading, he unlocked the storehouses of the wisdom of all people; by conversing, arguing, and debating, he learned to be at ease with his fellow-men; by writing, he learned to organize and enrich his knowledge and to direct the thoughts of others; by his trade apprenticeship, he came close to life and learned to love the struggling masses, and acquired that deep interest in technical training which became the vital element in his educational scheme.

CHAPTER II

SYSTEM OF EDUCATION ADVOCATED BY FRANKLIN

on

Education.

THE Sources in which are found in the most finished form Franklin's recommendations for the organization of education are: The Rules His Writings governing the Junto; Proposals relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania; Sketch of an English School; Observations concerning the Intentions of the Original Founders of the Philadelphia Academy. Other valuable ideas and explanations are found in minor treatises and in letters to friends.

System

Franklin, being himself self-educated, advocated a system whereby each individual could so utilize the sources and forces about him that in so doing he would become learned of Education and useful. It was just the system advocated by which he had educated himself. He believed that a man by his own efforts could reach perfection in almost any art. This we have set forth in the discussion of

by him.

His

Debating

his plan for attaining to moral perfection. altruism led him to give to others whatever he had found useful to himself, and his utilitarianism led him to seek from others what could be made of use to himself. This idea took shape in the Junto,1 a literary and debating club organized by him when he was twenty-two years old, for the purpose of applying his principles of self-education in a coöperative way. The importance of mutual aid was strongly Literary and emphasized in the rules governing the club. Every member was required to Society. propose queries for discussion, and periodically to produce and read an essay of his own writing upon some subject of interest to him. The debates were conducted in the sincere spirit of inquiry after truth, and members were prohibited, by small pecuniary penalties, from indulging in offensive personalities, trifling disputes, or strivings for victory. This club continued for nearly forty years, and was, according to Franklin's judgment, the best school of philosophy morality, and politics that then existed in the province. What he felt in after life that he had gotten from this method of training was a thorough, systematic habit of reading and the better

1 Sparks, Life of Franklin, p. 81. B. I. 319.