NOAH

On this date in 1758, the "Father of American Education" was born. Noah Webster grew up on a farm in Hartford, Connecticut. He attended Yale College during the Revolutionary War. He went on to law school but only practiced law for a short time because he did not find it to his liking. Webster became a teacher and started several schools without much success.

Alexander Hamilton brought him to New York City to edit a Federalist newspaper. Noah founded the first daily paper in NYC, American Minerva, in 1793. He edited that paper for four years and became one of the new nation's most prolific authors.

Webster published the first American dictionary in 1806 and then spent some 21 years compiling an expanded and comprehensive version which he called An American Dictionary of the English Language. To do this, he learned twenty-six foreign languages. It was published in 1828. The Miriam Company, now owned by Encyclopedia Britannica, continues this tradition.

To this point, American schools had all used text books written and printed in England. He set out to change that. He wrote and published a three-volume compendium that included a 'speller', a 'grammar' and a 'reader'. It is estimated that seven generations of Americans learned from his text books.

What would Noah Webster think of our educational system today? This should give you a hint. The speller that so many generations of Americans used began like this: "Be not anxious for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor for your body, what ye shall put on; for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of these things."

Further, the preface to his 1828 edition of An American Dictionary of the English Language included the following: "In my view, the Christian religion is the most important and one of the first things in which all children, under a free government ought to be instructed... No truth is more evident to my mind than that the Christian religion must be the basis of any government intended to secure the rights and privileges of a free people."
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