“I am the only one of the original trustees now living, and I am just stepping into the grave myself,” he declared, by way of reintroducing himself to the debate over what the young scholars should learn. As at the founding, he rejected the teaching of Latin and Greek to any but specialized scholars as an anachronism from an age that knew no other literature. Referring to the French habit of carrying hats on the arm, simply as ornaments, long after wigs displaced them from French pates, Franklin dubbed the vestigial teaching of the classics “the chapeau bras of modern literature.”
