http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah_Webster As a teacher, he had come to dislike American
elementary schools. They could be overcrowded, with up to seventy children of
all ages crammed into one-room schoolhouses, poorly staffed with
untrained teachers, and poorly equipped with no desks and unsatisfactory
textbooks which came from England. Webster thought that Americans should learn from
American books, so he began writing a three volume compendium, A Grammatical Institute of the English Language.
The work consisted of a speller (published in 1783), a grammar
(published in 1784),
and a reader (published in 1785). His goal was to provide a uniquely American,
Christ-centered approach to training children. The speller was originally entitled The First Part of the Grammatical Institute of the
English Language. The title was changed in 1786 to The American Spelling Book, and again in 1829 to The Elementary Spelling Book. Most people
called it the "Blue-Backed Speller" because of its blue cover, and
for the next one hundred years, Webster's book taught children how to read,
spell, and pronounce words. It was the most popular American book of its time;
by 1861, it was
selling a million copies per year, and its royalty of less than one cent per
copy was enough to sustain Webster in his other endeavors. Even Ben
Franklin used Webster's book to teach his granddaughter how to read. Noah was generally known to be Christian. It
is reported that Noah Webster’s 1828 American Dictionary contains the
greatest number of Biblical
definitions given in any reference volume. Webster considered "education
useless without the Bible."
Besides his dictionary, Webster also released his own
translation of the Bible in 1833. In doing the translation, Webster used the King James Version as a base. He consulted the
Hebrew and Greek along with various other versions and commentaries. |
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- Re: [TruthTalk] Noah Webster Lance Muir
- RE: [TruthTalk] Noah Webster ShieldsFamily
- Re: [TruthTalk] Noah Webster Lance Muir
- RE: [TruthTalk] Noah Webster ShieldsFamily
- Re: [TruthTalk] Noah Webster Lance Muir
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- RE: [TruthTalk] Noah Webster Kevin Deegan
- Re: [TruthTalk] Noah Webster Kevin Deegan