Useful Knowledge? Concepts, Values, and Access in American Education, 1776-1840

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From 1776 until the 1840s, America experienced a boom in the founding of societies dedicated to the spread of knowledge. Nearly one hundred such societies were founded, mainly in cities in the northeastern United States. Concomitantly, there was an increase in the number of publications devoted to the dissemination of useful knowledge.' Accompanying this rapid growth of learned societies and journals were changing conceptions of what constituted useful knowledge and, perhaps more importantly, how and to whom that useful knowledge should be conveyed. The concepts of useful knowledge and democratic education held by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson in the eighteenth century differed considerably from those of worker-oriented early nineteenthcentury reformers, such as Timothy Claxton and William Maclure, and even more so from those of Benjamin Silliman and Joseph Henry in the mid-nineteenth century. These shifts reflected basic changes in ideology, culture, and in American society itself. Franklin and Jefferson saw the acquisition of useful knowledge as an appropriate gentlemanly pursuit, as well as a way for mechanics to raise their status. To reformers of the