William Andrus Alcott Confessions Of A Schoolmaster Analysis

CONCERNING THE HIGH LEVEL OF LITERACY FROM WEBSTER’S AND OTHER
SYLLABLE-BASED METHODS, AND THE OPPOSITION TO THEM

Concrete records are available concerning the success of Webster’s speller and those like it with little children. What is surprising is that perhaps the best testimony concerning its success came from someone who spent massive effort trying to remove the Webster speller and those like it. He was one of the change-agents of the period, William Andrus Alcott, an associate of Gallaudet’s and of other change-agents of the period. His cousin was A. Bronson Alcott, who went to Pennsylvania about 1830 with William Russell, the Scot activist editor of the American Journal of Education, to work for government schools. In 1840, A.
In it, he gives his age at different periods, but does not tie it into dates. However,since his birth date is known, it is easy to tell the actual years in his account. From the ages of four to eight, he attended the “district” school, which is what the village or town schools were called, but at that time there was no state control over the schools. Alcott wrote, “Two summers and one winter had made me a ‘speller,’ as it was then called, and a tolerable reader of easy lessons.” That means, at the age of 5, in 1803, he could both read and
The complete syllabary, along with Noah Webster’s original speller in America, were dropped, like the famous hot potato, for beginning readers after 1826. The change from teaching beginners syllable sounds to teaching instead whole word meanings took place in both the United States and Great Britain in an astonishingly brief span of time. Floods of new textbooks came in print, which activists pushed for adoption in the new government-controlled schools. (The texts were sometimes written by the activists, probably because the possible profits from “official” texts were