Enlightenment Influence on Language Curriculum and the Impact of Webster's American Spelling Book
John Locke is well known for his ideas on government that show up in Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, but he also wrote extensively about the educational methods he thought were most effective. In his 1693 treatise, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, he suggests several ideas that remain popular, such as beginning a child’s education early in life, avoiding harsh punishments, and experiential learning over memorization.21 He also felt that, “To speak or write better Latin than English, may make a man be talked of; but he will find it more to his purpose to express himself well in his own tongue….This I find universally neglected, nor no care taken any where to improve young men in their own language.” Lesser-known founding father Noah Webster was inspired by ideas like this, as well as his experiences studying at Yale College during the Revolutionary War, and his early career as a schoolteacher.
Locke had been referring to British English, but for Noah Webster, it meant Americans should cease trying to pattern their speech after British aristocracy and work to standardize their own independent dialect. His 1792 essay On The Education of Youth gives some insight into the vision he had for America’s language and culture. In it, he insists that it was unpatriotic to send boys to Europe to be educated because they would return to America with a fondness for European wealth and culture and become poor citizens and worse leaders. Nor did he find it any better for Americans to be importing teachers and textbooks from Europe. Rather, he felt it harmed the country’s international reputation, making Americans look less independent than they were claiming to be.22
Webster is better known for his later-in-life contribution, An American Dictionary of the English Language, but his first publication was his most influential legacy. In 1782 he printed a spelling book for primary school children based loosely on Thomas Dilworth’s A New Guide to the English Tongue, a British import popular in the American colonies.23 Webster filled the book with vertical columns of words with shared characteristics, moving from the very easy “dot, got, hot, jot, lot, not”, to the more difficult “in-cum-bent, in-hab-it, in-trin-sic”. Multisyllabic words are separated, and the accented syllable is provided for the student. He arranges words with different vowel combinations that have the same sound in lists to be read together, such as “straight/great” and “graze/praise”.24 He was also very interested in creating ‘American’ spellings for words. This typically meant removing all unpronounced or extra letters and spelling words as closely as possible to the phonetic pronunciation, such as changing “colour” to “color”, “centre” to “center”, and “gaol” to “jail”. His contemporaries felt he went too far with this, and indeed, spellings like “wimmen” and “masheen” did not take off.
However, many of Webster’s changes remain in the language as markers of the American dialect. His speller, nicknamed ‘The Blue-Backed Speller’ for its cover, sold over a thousand copies a week by 178625 and would remain popular for a century. Estimates place its overall sales at one hundred million copies by 1900, more than any other book except the Bible.26 Webster expressed the same strong opinions his peers did about public schooling being necessary as a foundation for a free republic, and while it remained elusive in his lifetime, his textbook used the educational systems the country did have in place to create a lasting legacy of standardized American spellings and pronunciation.
21 Locke, John. Some thoughts concerning education. By John Locke, Esq;. London: sold by J. and R. Tonson in the Strand, MDCCLXXIX. [1779]. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (accessed November 20, 2024). https://link-gale-com.proxy2.cl.msu.edu/apps/doc/CW0119673185/ECCO?u=msu_main&sid=bookmark-ECCO&xid=46915fd4&pg=1.
22 Webster, Noah. “On the Education of Youth in America.” American Museum, or, Universal Magazine 12, no. 3 (September 1792): 173–75. https://search-ebscohost-com.proxy1.cl.msu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=h9h&AN=34861303&site=eds-live.
23 Martin, Peter. The Dictionary Wars: The American Fight over the English Language. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2019, p. 21.
24 Webster, Noah. The American Spelling Book: Containing an Easy Standard of Pronunciation ... Twenty-fourth Connecticut edition. Hartford: Printed by Hudson & Goodwin, 1801.
25 Martin, Peter. The Dictionary Wars: The American Fight over the English Language. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2019, p. 26.
26 Schiff, Judith. https://yalealumnimagazine.org/articles/2231-the-yalie-behind-the-american-dictionary#:~:text=His%20most%20phenomenal%20success%20was,found%20in%20any%20similar%20publication.