CHAPTER 1: Beyond Nationalism: The Founding Fathers and Educational Universalism in the New Republic

In his widely regarded 1790 essay, “On the Education of Youth in America,” Noah Webster sounded a clarion call for a nationalistic American education. Sometimes bordering on xenophobia, the essay decried Americans’ tendency to use foreigners as teachers, to use textbooks from other countries, and to teach American children the languages and histories of other countries without first teaching them to treasure their own. He wrote

Webster even went so far as to write a federal catechism for schoolchildren, and to recreate the English language in a distinctly American mode. His efforts have earned him the reputation of the “founding father of American nationalism” (Rudolph, 1965, p. 41). His famous spelling book, first published in 1783, sold 5 million copies by 1818, 60 million copies by 1890, and remains the second-best selling book in American history, after the Bible (Unger, 1998, p. 343; Webster, 1824, p. iv).