Noah Webster – Schoolmaster to America

Noah Webster (1758–1843) is a name recognized by many Americans today primarily for his excellent work, An American Dictionary of the English Language. Webster was also a lawyer, schoolmaster, author, newspaper editor, and an outspoken politician.

As a school teacher in 1778, in the midst of the War for Independence, Webster saw that American education was too dependent on British influence. American schools used British textbooks and taught British meanings for words. He believed that a continued attachment to Great Britain in education might lead to a return to her politically. Therefore, declaring that “America must be as independent in literature as she is in politics,” he began to promote a distinctly American system of education.

By the end of the American Revolution, Webster had already begun to write purely American textbooks. His first was an American speller. As a spelling reformer, Webster believed that English spelling rules were unnecessarily complex, so his dictionary introduced American English spellings, replacing colour with color, substituting wagon for waggon, printing center instead of centre, along with labor, honor, and public rather than labour, honour, and publick, respectively-all spellings still retained today. He also added American words like skunk and squash that did not appear in British dictionaries. He also penned American textbooks on grammar, government, history, geography, meteorology, medicine, morals, economics, theology, agriculture, etiquette, zoology, and other topics.

Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language took twenty-eight years to complete. To evaluate the etymology of words, Webster learned twenty-six languages, including Old English (Anglo-Saxon), Greek, Hebrew and Latin. Webster completed his dictionary during his year abroad in 1825 in Paris, France, and at the University of Cambridge. His book contained seventy thousand words, of which twelve thousand had never appeared before in a published dictionary.

At the age of 70, Webster published his dictionary in 1828, registering the copyright on April 14. Though it now has an honored place in the history of American English, Webster’s first dictionary only sold two and a half thousand copies. He was forced to mortgage his home to develop a second edition, and his life from then on was plagued with debt.

In 1840, the second edition was published in two volumes. On May 28, 1843, a few days after he had completed revising an appendix to the second edition, Noah Webster died.

Noah Webster was a Christian and famously said “Education is useless without the Bible.” His dictionary contains over six thousand Bible references and remains one of the only mainstream dictionaries to use Bible references to demonstrate the meaning of words.

Webster’s schoolbooks enjoyed widespread use for decades after his death. Many of them featured a picture of him and an epigraph above the picture declaring: “Noah Webster-He Who Taught Millions to Read, But Not One to Sin.”

One way that Webster helped students to avoid sin was by instructing them in the principles of God’s Word. Note here some of the advice he gave students in his public school textbooks:

“I would commend to you at this early period of life to become well acquainted with the Scriptures and with the facts and arguments which support their authenticity and their Divine original. Nothing is more common than for young men to fall into skepticism merely for want of a thorough knowledge of the Scriptures.”

“It is the sincere desire of the writer that our citizens should early understand that the genuine source of correct republican principles is the Bible, particularly the New Testament or the Christian religion.”

“The moral principles and precepts contained in the Scriptures ought to form the basis of all our civil constitutions and laws…all the miseries and evils which men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery, and war-proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible.”

Helping students remember their Creator in their youth was once a goal of American education in general and of Noah Webster in particular. Given the present state of decay in American public education, embracing a return to those same objectives is certainly a worthy consideration.

Tim Lewis can be contacted at timlewis1@windstream.net.

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