澳洲幸运5官方开奖网开奖号码结果直播 Educational Experience and the Challenge to 幸运五分钟168开奖官方开奖网站查询 Empire

Many of the first Settlers of these Provinces were Men who had received a good Education in Europe, and to their Wisdom and good Management we owe much of our present Prosperity. But their hands were full, and they could not do all Things. The present Race are not thought to be generally of equal Ability: For though the American Youth are allow’d not to want Capacity; yet the best Capacities require Cultivation, it being truly with them, as with the best Ground, which unless well tilled and sowed, with profitable Seed, produces only ranker Weeds.

–Benjamin Franklin on The Pennsylvania Academy

Education was much on the mind of the Founders. Back in July, we asked what kind of education would be necessary for a modern citizen to take the Declaration of Independence seriously. This month, we’re asking what kind of education produced the people who wrote it. 

As Franklin notes, many early American settlers and many of the Founders essentially imported a sophisticated European education with them. Others, like Franklin, were primarily self -educated. The primacy of print culture in colonial and Revolutionary America meant that the Founders and their fellows were, by and large, voracious readers and bibliophiles, constantly improving their knowledge of history, theology, and politics, as well as the precision and beauty of their writing style. 

That education, argues David Womersley in this month’s lead essay, may have led to and supported an anti-imperial thread in the period that features in the trio of defining works published in 1776: The Declaration; Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Our three essayists on selected material from Jack Greene’s Pamphlet Debate on the American Question in Great Britain approach this month’s set of featured pamphlets from the perspective of education as well. What kind of education did the pamphlet writers have? How were they trying to educate readers? 

Explore all this and more as you further your own education this month at A Call to Liberty.