By Dorothea Beale.
Let me earnestly beg of teachers not to put aside the question of spelling reform as of little moment, but to do their utmost to bring it about.
Can it be to educators of little moment that learning to read, instead of introducing children to an orderly system, reveals chaos, and interferes with the tendency upon which all science is founded to expect law and order. As Professor Max Müller writes «Every thing that children have to learn in reading and spelling is irrational; one rule contradicts the other, and each statement has to be accepted simply on authority, and with a complete disregard of those rational instincts, which lie dormant in the child, and ought to be awakened by every kind of healthy exercise».
I find it difficult to express my strong sense of the immense importance of this reform on grounds educational, economic, patriotic. Not only does our cacography oppose an enormous obstacle to intellectual progress during the most important years of mental development, and thus squander brain power on useless work, it is also a waste of money which is expended by the upper classes in forcing on the children of the poorer a waste of time and—a sort of useless prison-labour.
Dr Gladstone calculates that the average board-school child spends more than 2000 hours in acquiring the arts of reading and spelling, and that the waste of money is over £ 1000000. This was 20 years ago; with increased grants, the loss of money must be far more now. He also calculates the waste of capital in printing unnecessary letters at nearly 20 per cent. This is only one of the many arguments for reform, which he puts most clearly and forcibly.
Most of the richer children have an indefinite amount of leisure in childhood, and they forget how long it took to learn to read, but children in elementary schools groan under a pedantic tyranny, which imposes wearisome and useless labours upon those who might otherwise in their short school time gain such facility in reading, that it would be a pleasure ever after, and the time which is now wasted on spelling, would be available for much beside: Germans have time to acquire foreign tongues, but Englishmen and Frenchmen have not time to acquire them in addition to their own spelling; either language from its simple structure might become a world-wide tongue, and there would be no need of Volapuk.
I quote from Professor Max Müller’s article.
«According to a Liverpool Schoolmaster of great experience it takes from 6 to 7 years to learn the arts of reading and spelling with a fair amount of intelligence. I. e. about 2.000 hours. A Glasgow schoolmaster writes, «I have taught poor children to read the Sermon on the Mount after a course of exercises extending over no more than 6 hours», and a father writes, «My boy who is a few months more than 4 will read any phonetic book ... and how long do you think it took me to impart to him this power? Why something less than 8 hours, and that was in snatches of five minutes at a time; his next brother a boy of 6 has had a phonetic education, what is the consequence? Reading in the first stage was so delightful that he taught himself to read. My eldest boy 11 years old, at a first-rate school has carried off the prize for orthography». Mr. Ellis, who did so much for education writes, «With the phonetic system the Primer is mastered within 3 months at most; careful experiments have established 1) that pupils may be taught to read books in phonetic print in from 10 to 40 hours, and that when they have attained fluency in reading ordinary print, the pronunciation is much improved, the interest in study kept alive, and a logical training of enduring value given ... and they acquire the art of ordinary spelling more readily than those instructed on the old method.»»
Let those who think I exaggerate, look into Miss Soames’s introduction to Phonetics, and they will marvel how a foreigner can ever learn to read and write English—she gives the 34 ways in which we write the indefinite ‘a’ sound in aloud—the 26 for representing ‘or’; the 18 for giving ‘sh’ the 20 representing ‘n’, 18 for ‘k’, and so on—Pagliardini enumerates the 44 ways in which ‘oo’ is written and 36 for the sound ‘ee’; those who have tried to teach foreigners know how hopeless it all seems.
Pagliardini tells of a work published 1861 on French spelling, which gives 163 ingenious rules and occupies 285 pages. It is asserted that 2 lessons a week for 3 years will suffice. How much better writes Pagliardini would these precious hours be spent in studying noble thoughts in books, the history of nations, the mathematical sciences, or the laws by which God governs the universe, or if confined to words, then how much more interesting and intellectual would be their decomposition into their elements, showing their affinity with words in other languages. What a fund of poetry might be found in the metaphors of which words are the abbreviated forms. All this, now unopened to his view for lack of time, would be revealed.