I never attended a university. My formal schooling ended around age ten, and everything useful I learned afterward came from books I borrowed, tradesmen who tolerated my questions, and a subscription library I helped found in Philadelphia because none of us could afford to buy the books alone. So when people ask what I think of public education, understand that I am not speaking from a gentleman's study. I am speaking as someone who clawed every useful idea out of whatever institution would let him through the door.

The core argument for public schools is not sentimental — it is economic and civic. A self-governing republic requires citizens who can read a statute, evaluate a candidate's claim, calculate whether a contract is fair, and recognize when they are being swindled. These are not luxuries for the leisured class. They are the operating system of democracy. A population kept ignorant is a population kept dependent, and dependence is the seedbed of tyranny. I saw enough of monarchy to know that rulers who fear educated subjects do not fear them without reason.

The objection I hear most often is cost: why should the childless farmer pay taxes to school his neighbor's children? I put the same question to myself about the post roads. Why should the inland carpenter subsidize the coastal merchant's letters? Because the carpenter's prices, his contracts, his knowledge of distant markets — all of it travels on those same roads. Public information infrastructure pays compound interest. A town full of literate tradespeople generates more taxable commerce, requires less poor relief, and produces fewer of the frauds and panics that cost everyone dearly. The school is a public investment, not a public charity.

Libraries deserve the same defense. The Library Company of Philadelphia, which my junto founded in 1731, was built on a simple insight: knowledge pooled is knowledge multiplied. One man cannot afford every book; fifty men each paying a small subscription can afford a room full of them. A well-stocked public library is venture capital for the intellect of ordinary people — and ordinary people, given tools, do extraordinary things.

My counsel to any citizen today is this: before you vote to cut a school budget or close a library branch, go sit in that library on a Tuesday morning and watch who is there. You will find job-seekers, new immigrants learning the language of commerce, children doing homework because their apartments are too crowded for quiet. Then ask yourself whether the Republic can afford to send those people away empty-handed. I think you will find, as I always did, that the true extravagance is not the cost of education — it is the cost of its absence.