Abraham Lincoln had only about a year of formal schooling.
Abraham Lincoln is remembered as one of the most eloquent presidents in U.S. history, but little of his command of language came from a classroom. By his own estimate, all his formal schooling added together amounted to a bit less than a year, or perhaps about 10 months. In a brief biographical sketch prepared in 1858, he summed up his schooling with two words: “Education defective.”
Lincoln grew up in rural Kentucky and Indiana, where schools opened only when a teacher happened to be available. His lessons came, as he later put it, “by littles” — brief stretches of instruction scattered across his childhood. He attended primitive log cabin schools, including so-called “blab schools,” where students learned by reciting their lessons aloud. The standards for teachers were hardly rigorous. Lincoln recalled that no qualifications were required beyond “readin’, writin’, and cipherin’” (the latter meaning mathematics).
Farmwork also took precedence over school. Lincoln helped support his family by plowing fields, splitting rails, and performing other demanding labor. His parents could not afford a private tutor or send him away to study, so he largely educated himself. Books were scarce on the frontier, but Lincoln reportedly walked miles to borrow them. Among the works he read were the Bible, Aesop’s Fables, Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim’s Progress, and a biography of George Washington. (He borrowed the Washington biography from a neighbor; after it was accidentally damaged while in his care, he worked in the neighbor’s fields for three days to pay him back for it.)
That self-education habit continued into adulthood. Lincoln taught himself grammar, surveying, and law, borrowing legal texts and observing practicing attorneys rather than attending law school. He never went to college or any other institution of higher learning. Yet the boy whose schooling was measured in months eventually became a lawyer, a celebrated orator, and a president whose words remain among the most famous in American history.
