Not exactly teachers' pets

That's largely (but not exclusively) the thematic thread that runs through "How Lincoln Learned to Read," a quirky collection of tales of the formative years of a dozen famous Americans. Such a book could scarcely ignore old honest Abe, especially in the 200th year of his birth, when he has been reestablished as a publishing phenomenon. But author Daniel Wolff has gone searching in plenty of other log cabins and little red schoolhouses. With chapters profiling such luminaries as Ben Franklin and environmentalist Rachel Carson, it's a keyhole view into the country's first two centuries.

"To describe how and what we learn is to talk about the forces of history," suggests Wolff, author of "4th of July, Asbury Park," an appealingly odd little history of the seaside New Jersey town that inspired Bruce Springsteen's vision of America. "It's a way to tell the story of the democracy."

Not surprisingly, the Athens of America commands a sizable portion of this book about education, though not always favorably. The author shoves off from the ideas of John Adams's great-grandson, who wrote in "The Education of Henry Adams" that school was "time thrown away," that his experience at Harvard was four "wasted" years. Where, he asked, does each of us find an education that can be useful?

When the young woman who would become Sojourner Truth was of school age, the American school system was falling under the sway of Noah Webster and his blue-backed speller. Literacy and patriotism, the twin goals of Webster's original design, had given way to a third imperative: obedience.

"What are the defects of a democracy? Tumults and disorder," schoolchildren were taught to recite.

If early American education was a rigorous exercise in rote learning, the notable Americans included here are unified primarily by their disdain for, or at least circumventing of, traditional classroom recitation. Ben Franklin - printer, inventor, statesman - was through with school by age 10. Young Henry Ford believed wholeheartedly in Ralph Waldo Emerson's notion that "imitation is suicide." Jack Kennedy was nearly expelled from Choate for naming his informal fraternity of fellow goof-offs the Muckers Club, much to his headmaster's chagrin.

The chapters, each titled after the youthful nicknames of the author's subjects - "Nabby" (Abigail Adams), "Willie" (W.E.B. Du Bois), and a small-town Southerner named Elvis - are unrelated, except when they are. After clearing the area of Tecumseh's Indian Federation, Andrew Jackson owned hundreds of acres in the Alabama region that Helen Keller would later call home. The Assembly of God gospel singing that captivated a young Elvis Presley sounded "a lot like Sojourner Truth's ring shouts."

Like Lincoln, the gentle backwoods boy who only got angry "when anybody talked to me in a way I could not understand," many of Wolff's subjects were mainly self-taught. The death of the future president's mother brought a stepmother bearing allegorical lessons in the form of "The Pilgrim's Progress" (one of Franklin's early favorites) and "Aesop's Fables," and he avoided manual labor whenever possible in favor of "daydreaming" with books. Likewise, Helen Keller's introduction to literature - "The Swiss Family Robinson," "Little Women" - would become "my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised."

Some took only what they felt they needed from school. Henry Ford, the tinkerer famous for his observation that "history is bunk," loved the moral tales of the standardized McGuffey readers so much that he later rebuilt the author's birthplace as a museum. He also once said, "I don't like to read books; they mess up my mind."

On the other hand, some, like the civil rights activist Du Bois, benefited enormously from the country's emphasis on public education for all - in Willie's case, the "Massachusetts theory" subscribed to by the school system of Great Barrington, where he grew up.

If Wolff's book at times feels like an American biographical primer for adults (when was the last time you read about Keller?), "How Lincoln Learned to Read" reinforces the notion that the nation's inherent rebellious streak has served it well. "To believe your own thought," as Emerson wrote in his famous essay "Self-Reliance," "that is genius." Poor, unconnected people such as Elvis, he writes, "were supposed to harden into a category, to disappear." That they sometimes don't - that they sometimes find hope - well, that's a story worth retelling.

James Sullivan is the author of "The Hardest Working Man: How James Brown Saved the Soul of America."