Noah Webster known to most Americans as the man who wrote the first American dictionary worked as a school teacher in the last years of the eighteenth century. He realized that there were many problems with the way language and grammar were taught in American schools and he determined to do something about it. He came to this conclusion at a time when Americans were desperately trying to create and maintain its separate identity from its mother country of England.
Noah Webster decided that our individuality from England needed to be reflected in the educational materials that were used in American schools, and he set out to develop his first book called A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, which was later published as the American Spelling Book, which gave a standard for American spelling and grammar. He stated in this speller that his purpose for developing the book was “To diffuse a uniformity and purity of language in America, to destroy the provincial differences that originate in the tri
The “blue-book speller” was extremely important because its goal was to change schools in America from their English counterparts into American schools, unique to the developing American culture, because he felt that the heartbeat of this new land should be its own ideas and not a copy of the place that they had come from, they were a new people and a developing nation, not an extension and copy of England.
By attempting to create a standard for the American language he was empowering his idea that the ability to speak in an educated fashion was an important part in a persons ability to develop a personal belief system and an ability to fashion intelligent ideas. He believed a more educated and literate person would be of much more value to society.
The blue-back speller was a wonderful tool for American schools, but it was also merely a stepping stone for the great work that Noah Webster would continue to do. He wrote a complete dictionary of the English language called A Compendious Dictionary of the English Lan
Example Essays Home
