Ben franklin autobiography education

1791 book by Benjamin Franklin

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is the traditional name for the unfinished record of his own life written by Benjamin Franklin from 1771 to 1790; however, Franklin appear to have called the work his Memoirs. Although it had a tortuous publication history after Franklin's death, this work has become one of the most famous and influential examples of an autobiography ever written.

Franklin's account of his life is divided into four parts, reflecting the different periods during which he wrote them. There are actual breaks between the first three parts of the narrative, but Part Three's narrative continues into Part Four without an authorial break. The work ends with events in his life from the year 1758 when he was 52 (Franklin would die in 1790 at age 84).

In the "Introduction" of the 1916 publication of the Autobiography, editor F. W. Pine wrote that Franklin's biography provided the "most remarkable of all the remarkable histories of our self-made men" with Franklin as the greatest exemplar.

Summary

Part One

Part One of the Autobiography is addressed to Franklin's son William, at that time (1771) Royal Governor of New Jersey. While in England at the estate of the Bishop of St Asaph in Twyford, the 65-year-old Franklin begins by describing his parents and grandparents, recounting his childhood, expressing his fondness for reading, and narrating his apprenticeship to his brother James Franklin, a Boston printer and publisher of the New-England Courant. A

Remember Linda’s question to me last week? In one word—why are you not more effective? Were you able to pick a word or virtue that will be your quest this year? Let’s build on that idea with one who became a model for improvement, Benjamin Franklin.

I recently reread the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Franklin understood well the idea of becoming. Through dedicated discovery and systematic self-improvement, he lived an attitude of abundance and joy. He noted, “Human felicity is produced not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day.” 

It is the little choices that inform the outcome.  

A little history about a man who made history…

Franklin was the youngest son of 17 children. He had modest formal schooling to the age of 10. He learned early that all education is self-education. One of his peers noted, 

Your biography will not merely teach self-education, but the education of a wise man; and the wisest man will receive lights and improve his progress, by seeing detailed the conduct of another wise man. 

Benjamin Vaughan

By his early teens he had taken responsibility for his own education stating:  

I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books…..Often I sat up in my room reading the greatest part of the night, when the book was borrowed in the evening and to be returned early in the morning, lest it should be missed or wanted.  

Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Franklin’s personal library included classics such as Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, Plutarch’s Lives, Locke’s An Essay concerning Human Understanding and Xenophon’s The Memorable Things of Socrates. His early education, and subseq

“People who have read one or more of the many current books about Benjamin Franklin really ought to direct their attention to the man himself, specifically to The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. . . . It is the first great American book. . . . An extraordinary document. . . . Plainly yet vividly written, its 18th-century prose still accessible to ordinary readers more than two centuries later. . . . It portrays Colonial and Revolutionary America . . . with an immediacy unmatched in almost any other document. . . . Franklin’s wisdom is for the ages, our own as much as his. So read the Autobiography and—among the many editions available—read Yale’s. Its text is the most reliable (the Franklin papers are at Yale) and its supplementary material is uniformly useful.”—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post

“The best and most beautiful edition [of the Autobiography].”—J. H. Plumb, New York Review of Books

“Where so many fancy books are long on pictures and short on readable reading matter, this one is superbly the reverse. . . . What counts here is the text: the first thoroughly edited and adequately annotated version of Franklin’s memoirs faithful in every word to Franklin’s holograph. . . . The result is like cleaning away the grime and crackled varnish of generations to discover unsuspected sparkle in an old master.”—Time

“From a Child I Was Fond of Reading”: Benjamin Franklin Becomes a Printer

College education was rare in colonial America, mostly intended for young men entering the ministry. Artisans learned the skills and secrets of their trade through an apprenticeship to a master as Benjamin Franklin related in this excerpt about his education as a craftsman from his famous autobiography. After their service they became journeymen, hired for a time while they saved to open a workshop of their own. Franklin’s father, with seventeen children, had to plan carefully in order to secure a niche for his youngest child, Benjamin. Printers stood near the top of the mechanical arts because the trade required literacy. Printers, clustered in the port cities, often formed a network of interrelated families; Benjamin’s brother James was a master before him. Benjamin quickly learned the printing trade and ventured out into independent activities. Armed with his valuable training and a penchant for independence, he never finished his term of service and instead moved on to ply his trade in Philadelphia and London.

My elder brothers were all put apprentices to different trades. I was put to the grammar-school at eight years of age, my father intending to devote me, as the tithe of his sons, to the service of the Church. My early readiness in learning to read (which must have been very early, as I do not remember when I could not read), and the opinion of all his friends, that I should certainly make a good scholar, encouraged him in this purpose of his. My uncle Benjamin, too, approved of it, and proposed to give me all his short-hand volumes of sermons, I suppose as a stock to set up with, if I would learn his character. I continued, however, at the grammar-school not quite one year, though in that time I had risen gradually from the middle of the class of that year to be the head of it, and farther was removed into the next class above it, in order to go w