A Review of the Pedagogical Studies in the Teaching of Spelling

Despite the fact that a few far-seeing men have, from the early years of the eighteenth century, inveighed against the dominance of spelling and the cruel drudgery it entailed upon the learner, the subject remained an independent discipline far into the nineteenth century. To be able to spell was the criterion whereby to judge the educated man and so ingrained did this become in the popular mind that even to this day our grandfathers, nay our fathers, dubiously shake their heads because spelling no longer occupies a conspicuous place on the schoolroom program and because, as they insist, the rising generation cannot spell