Orthography

At the Museum of Appalachia north of Knoxville near Norris, Tennessee at the community of Bethel, unincorporated there is a little one room school house with a teacher's certificate dated 1888. On this certificate are listed all the subjects that this teacher is approved to teach. Before reading, writing and arithmetic, at the very beginning of the list of perhaps 7 or 8 subjects is orthography. My grandfather, Joe Jarrett Burden was born in 1888 and taught in a one room school in Kentucky for several years as a young man. His observation was that immediately after the Federal Reserve Act was passed, the very next thing "they" did was change all the textbooks. I was born in 1953 and went to a public school in Kentucky. Can someone enlighten me concerning the subject ORTHOGRAPY. Thank you.

Orthography relates to language and what we would today call "English" (combined with "Spelling") - In the late 1800's education was much broader than many of us assume today. When I was growing up it had pretty much devolved to Strunk and White's Elements of Style www.amazon.com/Elements-Style-Fourth-William-Strunk/dp/020530902X and diagramming sentences. I don't even know if kids are taught to diagram sentences these days.

From wikipedia

Orthography generally refers to spelling; that is, the relationship between phonemes and graphemes in a language.[2][3] Sometimes spelling is considered only part of orthography, with other elements including hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation.[4] Orthography thus describes or defines the set of symbols (graphemes and diacritics) used in a language, and the rules about how to write these symbols.

Most natural languages developed as oral languages, and writing systems have usually been crafted or adapted afterwards as representations of the spoken language. In an etic sense, the rules for writing systems are arbitrary, which is to say that any set of rules could be considered "correct" if the users of the language mutually agreed to convene upon that set of rules as the standard way to represent the spoken language. However, as standardization takes stronger hold, an emic epistemology of "right and wrong" develops, in which compliance with, or violations of, the standards are viewed as right, or wrong, in a way analogous to moral right and wrong, and in which each word has a written identity that is no less standardized than its oral-aural identity, which is emically unitary. The term orthography is sometimes used in a linguistic sense to refer to any method of writing a language, without judgment as to right and wrong, with a scientific understanding that orthographic standardization exists on a spectrum of strength of convention. But the original sense of the word stem, which evolved long before linguistic science, implies a dichotomy of correct and incorrect, and the word stem is still most often used to refer not just to a way of writing a language but more specifically to the thoroughly standardized (emically "correct") way of writing it.