How Did Franklin Spend His Thursday Nights?

Benjamin Franklin didn't become wise alone. Every Thursday evening, he gathered a small group of people he called the Junto: a club for mutual improvement. They met at a tavern, drank beer, and asked each other hard questions.

Franklin wrote the questions himself. They included:

"Have you met with anything in the author you last read, deserving of your acquaintance's particular notice?"

"Do you know of any fellow citizen who has lately done a worthy action, deserving praise and imitation?"

"Do you think of anything at present, in which the Junto may be serviceable to mankind?"

"Have you lately observed any encroachment on the just liberties of the people?"

"Have you or any of your acquaintance been lately sick or wounded?"

"In what manner can the Junto rise most advantageously to their members and to the world?"

These were not casual questions. They were designed to force members to think about ideas they'd encountered, about what they owed to their neighbors, about what it meant to be a citizen.

Walter Isaacson, who wrote the definitive biography of Franklin, observed that in the Junto, Franklin learned to hold his tongue. He had been prone, he admitted, to "prattling, punning and joking, which only made me acceptable to trifling company." The Junto cured him of it. He learned that "knowledge was obtained rather by the use of the ear than of the tongue."

Franklin ran the Junto for 38 years. Out of it came the first public library in America, the first fire department in Philadelphia, proposals for street lighting, and friendships that shaped the founding of a nation.

He understood something most people still haven't learned: intelligence is not a solo sport. Your thinking gets sharper against other people's thinking. The questions you won't ask yourself, someone else in the room will ask for you.

The Junto didn't change America all at once. It changed it one Thursday evening at a time.