While perusing a recent copy of Education Week, I was pleasantly surprised. One article speculated that a once-nearly-universal building block of American Education, the spelling test, may be making a comeback.
Newly Recognized Value
The article is based upon a “meta-analysis” that compiles fifty-nine separate studies of students with learning disabilities (LD). One of the more common LDs is dyslexia, in which certain students’ minds reverse the order of letters when they see them on the printed page. While the science behind the diagnosis is relatively new, historical evidence suggests that many significant people have suffered from the malady, including Winston Churchill, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Agatha Christie, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and George Washington. As that list should indicate, dyslexia often affects those with superior intellects.
The studies indicate that, for such students, studying spelling is especially helpful. Since their minds might perceive the word about as “aobtu,” studying the correct spelling helps them modify their mistaken perceptions.
The concluding line of the study’s abstract is a masterpiece of couching the obvious behind almost unintelligible jargon. “Findings highlight the need for systematic replication of spelling interventions to further understand the impact on writing and reading outcomes for students with LD.”
In other words, children with LDs need to learn to spell. If I may interject, so do the rest of us.
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Contrasting Methods
I suspect that many readers may find that conclusion ridiculously obvious. Traditionally, the ability to spell has always been considered one of the essential building blocks of communication. The fact that educators ever questioned this idea might surprise those who attended conventional schools. However, since roughly 1970, educational progressives often decried long-established methods of teaching children to spell, or even the need to learn to spell at all.
For those educated in progressive schools, an explanation of the traditional process may be in order. Spelling instruction usually followed a set structure, although the preferences of teachers and school schedules may have altered some of the details. My sixth-grade teacher’s usual process went something like this:
Monday – The teacher distributed and introduced a new list of words. That introduction included reading the words aloud, emphasizing their pronunciation, and perhaps a word or two about how to use them.
Tuesday – Students were instructed to look up each word in a dictionary, writing out the phonetic spelling, part of speech (noun, verb, adjective etc.) and definition.
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Wednesday – Students were instructed to use each word in a meaningful sentence.
Thursday – Students took a test in which the teacher dictated each word and the students tried to spell it correctly.
Friday – The teacher returned the graded tests, and students were instructed to write each misspelled word correctly ten times.
The “Critical Thinking” Myth
As with many other long-established practices, spelling instruction encountered the “critical thinking” buzzsaw around 1970. As one educational theorist phrased it in 1976, the purpose of education became “to nurture the individual, to help [a student] to realize the full potential that already exists inside him or her.”
It is difficult to remember how attractive such twaddle appeared during the revolutionary decade inaugurated by San Francisco’s erroneously named “Summer of Love” in 1967. As the collegians of that time entered the teaching profession, they discarded many time-honored methods of schooling. The theorists pretended to base their conclusions on empirical evidence. In reality, they identified practices that ran afoul of their ideology and then developed a set of intellectual-sounding reasons to discard them.
Perhaps the most common attack was that spelling is a purely mechanical process. As such, it had no place in the free-wheeling “atmosphere of inquiry” that the progressives labored to create. Budding teachers learned that expecting students to spell correctly was an inherently oppressive task that robbed children of their individuality and subjected them to mind-numbing rules.
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The Process of Change
A far more “democratic” process, the progressives decreed, was to let young children indulge in “invented (or inventive) spelling.” Developed by linguist Charles Reed in 1975, the idea was that children would invent spelling based on phonetics. Of course, he dressed up his fallacy in the language of academia. “[L]earning to spell is not a matter of memorizing words, but a developmental process that culminates in a much greater understanding of English spelling than simple relationships between speech sounds and their graphic representations.” As children aged and became more proficient, they could use a dictionary or other aids to reflect standard spellings.
Within a few years, the publishers of the most popular standardized tests adopted these theories. They stopped deducting points for misspelled words when calculating scores on exams that required short answers or essay responses. Additionally, the coming of word processors added a new dimension to these arguments.
In 2021, three researchers examined the process as part of their paper, “Does Spelling Still Matter – and If So, How Should It Be Taught?” They classified three objections to requiring correct spelling. First, technologies such as spell check and autocorrect were common to all the most popular word processing programs – why worry about spelling when the machine could correct any issues? Second, standardized tests no longer penalize incorrect spelling. Third, the everyday use of email proliferated commonly understood but technically incorrect spelling patterns.
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Re-Embracing Reality
Nonetheless, these researchers maintained that correct spelling was still necessary. Their reasons had nothing to do with theory. Instead, they emphasized that prospective employers and other readers still expect words to be spelled correctly.
Today, Artificial Intelligence (AI) adds another dimension to the argument. AI subverts many educational goals by allowing students to produce essays and papers that they cannot read or understand. Increasingly, teachers and professors fight the tendency by requiring students to write such work in longhand under close supervision.
It is increasingly clear that spelling is a necessary life skill, and, as Education Week pointed out, it is invaluable to students with specific common learning disabilities. However, most current elementary school teachers did not learn spelling or longhand writing as students. After all, a thirty-five-year-old teacher entered school about 1995, long after progressive schools abandoned spelling instruction. Will they be able to pass skills that they never possessed on to their students?
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This problem will require a very long time and much effort to correct. Despite its eagerness to adopt the latest crackpot ideas, the public education system shows little ability to acknowledge its failings and make the long-term efforts this situation requires.
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First published on TFP.org.