Experience keeps a dear school but fools will learn in no other and scarce in that" (1, p. 225) 5 as Poor Richard said. In many ways, Benjamin Franklin was a prototypal American, more so than most of the aristocratic Founding Fathers of our country. He was the lineal cultural and intellectual forebear of such persons as Abraham Lincoln and Will Rogers. He was a person primarily of the deepest common sense and practicality with which he combined such versatility of interest, zeal for social and self improvement, resourcefulness, competence, and a host of other elementary virtues as to set him off uniquely among the persons who were influential in educational matters in the Colonies. His extraordinary gifts as a homespun aphorist derived from a sharpness and incisiveness of mind which made his counsel constantly in demand in the 18th Century, and his homilies have become so much a part of our language that when he is quoted people think more often than not that this polished wisdom has come from either Holy Writ or the Bard of Avon. His role as sage and ultimate pragmatist of the Colonies had a marked influence upon the development of educational enterprises, particularly in the neighborhood of Philadelphia.
He himself had very little schooling, having been as he says, "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." (1, p. 11.) A person familiar with Franklin in later life would have counseled Josiah Franklin against an ultimate profession so little likely to be congenial to his son. Even such elementary preparation was curtailed for, as he says, "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 at the head of it, and farther, was removed into the next class above it in order to go with that to the third at the end of the year." (1, p. 12.) It is unlikely that the nature of the Grammar School education in Massachusetts was such as to appeal particularly to Franklin, for it would seem that he always valued independent progress and self improvement above all forms of teaching. He himself at an early age developed that fondness for books which characterized his whole life, and in fact, he says that he could not remember the time when he could not read. Though he was not particularly