Teachers’ Journal On Spelling

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31139, 16 August 1966, Page 18

Teachers’ Journal On Spelling

“More nonsense has been spoken about spelling than about most school subjects and some of this self-righteous criticism was heard before the birth of the oldest reader of ‘National Education.’ ” says a leading article in this journal of the Educational Institute.

“Research has shown that some people will always be poor spellers: experience proves that, while Homer nods, even the most painstaking proofreaders can allow his battle-scarred heroes Ito become bottle-scarred or ' battle-scared.

j “However, there are people who don’t care about their spelling—and some of them should know better,” says the journal. “Every teacher with any concern for the reputation of his profession must have blushed to hear in a Parliamentary broadcast or to read reports that a teachers’ college students' association had let the team down. Their representations to a Parliamentary committee contained, according to one member of Parliament, nine spelling errors, several grammatical mistakes, and several failures to correct a typewriter which couldn’t spell either. That is just not good enough. “Not all their piety nor wit can cancel out a single line ■of it. No matter how wellj informed their representa'tions, it is easy for those who differ to denigrate their cause and doubt their judgment. No matter how well they are mastering the classI room skills, it is all too easy jfor the critic to move on ifrom doubting to despising, iand from asking whether these students should be eligible to exercise the suffrage—as they did not spell it —to suggesting that they should not be trusted to teach.

“Unfortunately, this carelessness is not restricted to students. There are teachers of all ages whose command of the written word is below

the high standard the coinmunity expects from those whose business is words and the communication of ideas. It is a fault equally of Pants' jmentarians—though many o f them are less concerned than teachers with ideas and facts —and it is a fault encouraged even by Government agencies which advertise "Ha\ a banana.” “Drinka pinta milka day” and “Bananas, the fruit with a-peel.” Has any Minister of Education ever protested to his colleagues about this official debasement of the language? “But what some backroom copy-writer can get off with, a teacher cannot. This public chastisement by an MP should remind us all that the fierce light which beats about a throne is no brighter than the glare of publicity in which teachers spend their working lives and much of what should be their private lives. “Everyone who has ever been corrected at school—aod that is all of us, or teachers are not doing their job—is waiting to pounce gleefully on the slightest pedagogical pec cadillo. Editors are just as vulnerable, though perhaps more hardened. They know it is an occasion for no swearing aloud.”