Education during the Colonial and Revolutionary Periods

Noah Webster’s Vision for American Education

Noah Webster and others, including Benjamin Rush, believed that the Americanized educational system would instill the values of liberty and virtue in the minds of American children, strengthening their sense of loyalty to their nation. He claimed that the Americans needed to focus more on their own languages and avoid the “dead” ones. He argued that having a poor education was preferable to staying uneducated for American children. Webster was devoted into shaping the American language because he believed that the American politics, social practices, and languages were supposed to be free of any European domination. According to him, the American language was the basic structure by which to define the American character. Webster too believed that the calling of the 1789 American Revolution required that they as independent nation, the honor required them to have their own system of a government and a language. Webster believed that the British language was aged and on decline and therefore should never have been made standard in America as it would corrupt the country’s political, linguistic, and social reforms.

Noah Webster’s Contributions

Webster came up with the dictionary, speller, and other texts so as to instill “correct” rules of spelling, pronunciation, and grammar - and moral precepts - that would bind Americans together. The main aim of Webster was to ensure uniformity and remove regional and ethnic variations in dialect while at the same time making Americans free from European way of life.

Successes and Challenges

Why Noah Webster was successful in some changes and not others

Webster succeeded in terms of establishing uniformity of spelling and a shared understanding of word meanings. His approach of asserting that the new dictionary speller was to ensure unity of the Americans while freeing them from the colonial dialects appealed to many people. Webster was unsuccessful in some because, due to the regional and ethnic diversity, common pronunciation and proper diction proved quite difficult to attain, no matter how carefully marked were the pronunciation symbols.