Joanne Jacobs discusses a recent article in the Chron about how some teachers have given up on teaching kids spelling and grammar, which set off an interesting and (I think) unnecessarily divisive discussion about what makes a good speller. Joanne claims that reading and a love of reading from an early age is important for later spelling skills.

While I think she’s largely right, this issue seems almost like the nature versus nurture debate for sexual orientation. Yes, there probably isn’t a hundred percent correlation, but the correlation could be high, and a few people chiming in with anecdotes about themselves doesn’t provide any insight.

There are no doubt people (perhaps dyslexics or others) who are really constitutionally unable to spell well, who are nonetheless intelligent and enjoy reading and writing. But I also think that the notion that reading from an early age imprints the way the words look is valid for many people, particularly for those who are (like me) extremely verbal (i.e., I tend to think in words rather than images or concepts). When I spell, I actually visualize the word in my mind, and when I see a misspelling on a page, it jumps out at me almost as though it’s a different color.

Some people in her comments section point out that it’s becoming an unnecessary skill with the advent of spell checkers. In my humble opinion a spell checker for poor spellers is a worse crutch than a calculator for those who can’t do simple arithmatic, because at least the calculator never gets it wrong. But a spell checquer will only tell you if a word is spelled correctly–not if it’s the right word.

Reading, riting and rithmatic are just as important, if not more important now than they’ve ever been, and it’s a travesty that these things are not being properly taught in our public schools, and that many of the public school employees don’t seem to think that they should be. The words of the commission on public education from over two decades ago remain just as true, or even more so, today. If a foreign power had imposed on our nation the public school system that we’ve devised for ourselves, we would rightly consider it an act of war.