Benjamin Franklin and Democratic Education Beyond Schooling

Political theorists have long focused their understanding of democratic education on the institution of the school, particularly the public school, to the exclusion of broader visions of education beyond schooling. But as criticisms of schooling from outside the academy mount, it becomes imperative to examine the origins of American educational thought to determine whether opposition to schooling has an older historical source. This essay locates the roots of school skepticism in an alternative American educational tradition beginning with Benjamin Franklin that drew on Locke’s pedagogical arguments to devalue institutional schooling in favor of self-education. Franklin’s educational vision harnessed the independence of the young in early America by incentivizing learning through friendship and self-interest, and resorted to schools only as a guardrail against the abuse of freedom, incorporating them but minimizing their role in education. In this, Franklin initiated the Americanization of Lockean pedagogy, or the school-skeptical tradition in American thought.