Ben Franklin’s 1747 Proposal for Practical Education Reform

That is sorely needed today

In 1747, Benjamin Franklin published a pamphlet that would become the founding document of the University of Pennsylvania. The pamphlet, titled “Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania,” is one of the earliest American attempts to rethink what education should actually do. Franklin was 41 years old, recently retired from his printing business, and annoyed that Pennsylvania, unlike several other colonies, had no institution to prepare young men for useful lives.

What’s remarkable about this document is not just that it worked (the Academy opened in 1751 and became UPenn 40 years later), but that it solved problems we’re still failing to solve today. We complain that education is too theoretical, disconnected from real work, focused on credential signaling rather than actual competence. Franklin complained about the exact same things. And then he built something better.

Franklin built something that lasted. Ironically, the University of Pennsylvania now represents the very elite model he was pushing against.

Franklin’s vision, articulated in his 1747 pamphlet, was about enabling mass upward mobility through practical education. He believed schools should serve “the middling people” (shopkeepers, tradesmen, farmers), giving them tools to prosper through diligence, hard work, and virtue; rather than grooming an elite through classical learning.

(My full post summary of Walter Isaacsons biography of Franklin)

Useful and Ornamental

The opening premise of Franklin’s educational philosophy appears in his Proposals with characteristic bluntness:

“As to their STUDIES, it would be well if they could be taught every Thing that is useful, and every Thing that is ornamental: But Art is long, and their Time is short. It is therefore propos’d that they learn those Things that are likely to be most useful and most ornamental. Regard being had to the several Professions for which they are intended.”

This is so obvious it’s almost embarrassing. Time is limited. Some things are more useful than others. Teach the useful things. And yet somehow our educational system has lost sight of this basic constraint. We act as if students have infinite time, so we can afford to spend years on material that will never be used, justified by vague appeals to “well-rounded education” or “cultural literacy.”

Plenty of people could have said “teach what’s useful.” Franklin went further: he defined usefulness around service. The goal of education, he wrote, should be to cultivate “an Inclination join’d with an Ability to serve Mankind, one’s Country, Friends and Family; which Ability is (with the Blessing of God) to be acquir’d or greatly increas’d by true Learning; and should indeed be the great Aim and End of all Learning.”

True merit, in Franklin’s view, meant the ability to serve. Not the ability to signal intelligence, or accumulate credentials, or win arguments about obscure points of theology. The ability to actually do things that improve other people’s lives. Education was supposed to give you that ability.

This seems almost radical today, when so much of elite education is about developing the capacity for sophisticated verbal reasoning disconnected from any tangible output. A kid who can write a brilliant essay deconstructing gender norms in Victorian literature but can’t fix a broken toilet or build a basic website has been educated, by Franklin’s standards, into uselessness.

Learning by Doing

The specifics of Franklin’s proposed curriculum are fascinating because they solve, with startling elegance, problems we’re only now beginning to articulate.

Take his approach to teaching writing. Rather than starting with abstract rules of grammar and rhetoric, he proposed having students write letters to each other, make abstracts of what they read, retell stories in their own words. All of this would then be reviewed and corrected by their tutor, who would “give his Reasons, explain the Force and Import of Words, &c.”

This is the educational equivalent of test-driven development, and what we’d now call project-based learning. You write the code first, then debug it, and the debugging process teaches you the underlying principles. Compare this to the standard approach: here are the rules of grammar, now write something that follows them. One method teaches you to communicate; the other teaches you to avoid mistakes on standardized tests.

Franklin was explicit about this pedagogical philosophy. He quotes extensively from John Locke and other educational reformers to make the point: “Rules are best understood, when Examples that confirm them, and point out their Fitness or Necessity, naturally lead one, as it were by the Hand, to take Notice of them. One who is persuaded and moved by a Speech, and heartily admires its Force and Beauty, will with Pleasure enter into a critical Examination of its Excellencies... But to teach Rules abstractly, or without Examples, and before the agreeable Effects the Observance of them tends to produce have been felt, is exceedingly preposterous.”

This principle extends throughout the curriculum. While studying natural history, students would practice “a little Gardening, Planting, Grafting, Inoculating” and make “Excursions...to the neighbouring Plantations of the best Farmers, their Methods observ’d and reason’d upon for the Information of Youth.” They would learn mechanics by studying prints of machines, then copying them, then understanding the principles that made them work. They would learn morality not through abstract philosophical texts but by reading history and “making continual Observations on the Causes of the Rise or Fall of any Man’s Character, Fortune, Power.”

The entire curriculum was built around a single clever insight: use history as the vehicle for teaching everything else. “But if HISTORY be made a constant Part of their Reading,” Franklin wrote, “may not almost all Kinds of useful Knowledge be that Way introduc’d to Advantage, and with Pleasure to the Student?” Through historical reading, students would naturally encounter geography, chronology, ancient customs, moral philosophy, political theory, oratory, all in context and motivated by narrative rather than forced memorization.

Character Formation

Modern education has largely given up on explicitly teaching virtue. We teach skills (barely) and knowledge. We might gesture vaguely at “critical thinking” or “leadership.” But we don’t systematically try to make students into better people.

Franklin had no such hesitation. Character formation was central to his vision.

“With the whole should be constantly inculcated and cultivated, that Benignity of Mind, which shows itself in searching for and seizing every Opportunity to serve and to oblige; and is the Foundation of what is called GOOD BREEDING; highly useful to the Possessor, and most agreeable to all.”

Benignity of mind. The habit of looking for opportunities to help other people. This wasn’t a side effect of education; it was the main point.

He specified that students should live plainly and frugally, that they should be “frequently exercis’d in Running, Leaping, Wrestling, and Swimming,” that they should learn through reading history “the Advantages of Temperance, Order, Frugality, Industry, Perseverance.”

The goal was not just to make students competent but to make them good. And Franklin believed this wasn’t some mystical quality you either had or didn’t; it could be cultivated through practice and habituation, the same way you cultivate any other skill.

This is deeply unfashionable today. We’ve become squeamish about moral education, worried that it’s either religious indoctrination or empty moralizing. At the same time, universities still promote values; but often in selective or contradictory ways. Some emphasize ideals like free inquiry, pluralism, and intellectual courage. Others foster a culture of fragility, where discomfort is treated as harm and moral life is framed as a battle between good people and bad people. Franklin’s approach was different. It was practical virtue ethics: here are the qualities that will make you successful and useful. Let’s practice them until they become habits.

What We’ve Lost

The tragedy is that we know all this. We complain constantly about the deficiencies in modern education. Too much theory, not enough practice. Too much credentialism, not enough competence. Too much focus on high-status signaling, not enough on actually useful skills.

And yet we keep doing the same thing.

Part of the problem is that we’ve recreated the filtering system Franklin explicitly rejected. Jefferson’s vision of cultivating a small educated elite ultimately won. Modern education is about identifying the “best,” polishing them with four years of expensive liberal arts education, then sorting them into prestigious graduate programs and professional careers. The point is not to make them useful; most of what they learn will never be used. The point is to mark them as members of the elite.

Franklin’s vision would look different. Education would be shorter, cheaper, more practical. You would learn by doing rather than by listening to lectures. You would be taught things you’ll actually use. The curriculum would integrate knowledge rather than fragmenting it into specialized departments. And the goal would be to make you productive and virtuous, not to mark you as elite.

Some people are trying to build this. Coding bootcamps teach practical programming skills in months rather than years. Trade schools still exist, teaching people to be electricians and plumbers and HVAC technicians. Various educational startups are experimenting with project-based learning and alternative credentials.

For now these are small experiments. But if they continue to grow and prove themselves, they may end up outcompeting the existing system, delivering practical, affordable education while universities remain stuck in their old model.