Barry Hasan Durmaz

American patriots who choose to educate their children in public schools desire instruction in the principles and values of the Founding Fathers. Yet rarely do we think of a Founding Father connected with the education responsible for defining and producing a free people—a free nation.

That’s why Noah Webster is considered our forgotten Founding Father. In the year 1787 of the Constitutional Convention, he is responsible for protecting intellectual property through copyright and patents codified in Article I; Section 8; Clause 8 of the Supreme Law of the Land.

In 1833 Webster published the first American revised version of the Bible from the original Hebrew and Greek.

Noah Webster believed “America must be as independent in literature as she is in politics…”. Therefore, his life’s crowning achievement is the American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828. It took him twenty years to complete it.

The 1828 dictionary is both the most scholarly and the most Christian dictionary ever published.

It had more biblical citations than ever appeared in any secular volume, and it defined with great clarity and precision the unique kind of character, morality, education, law, liberty, government, and economy that originally gave America special identity.

If you want your children to understand the thinking of the founding era, including terms used in our Declaration of ’76 and Constitution, doesn’t it make sense to source word definitions from that era and not from our own?

Webster’s 1828 edition dictionary is a gem. Twenty-eight percent of the words are defined by Holy Scripture. Webster’s testimony of his conversion to saving faith in the Lord Jesus Christ is in the preface. Why has that been edited out of the Merriam-Webster dictionary? That is a dishonoring move and attack on the distinctly Bible-based, Christian founding of America. And we’ve gone downhill from there. Let this column and your action be part of the recovery effort.

Webster’s dictionary imparts to its user a worldview where the one true God is the center of reality, whereas the modern dictionary places man as the center of all things.

Want to address the decline in academic excellence? Get your word definitions from Webster’s 1828 dictionary. Want to address the rebellion in America’s youth—introduce them to word definitions that embrace the spirit behind the letter of the written word.

This dictionary can displace the socialism that is an affront to what our Founding Fathers left for their future posterity. It lays the groundwork that the Word of God written is the final authority for mankind, not mankind himself.

The problem with Common Core and modern public education curriculum is that they do not promote the fear of God in students. They do not teach God as the foundation for learning anything. So why should our children love learning anything of substance?

If you want Florida schools to teach the founding principles of America, then you must take possession of the ideas that make for America. There must be a recovery effort to reclaim word meanings that reflect the understanding of the founding era. Your modern dictionary is wholly obsolete for such endeavor, although it is necessary to contrast and highlight the decline in public education since the founding.

Want children in America to learn the values of our Founding Fathers? Here’s the first one from the Father of American education and scholarship—“education is useless without the Bible”.

Facsimile reproductions of Webster’s 1828 dictionary are available from the Foundation for American Christian Education; www.face.net.