A professor of educational technology at England’s Newcastle University thinks that a Ralph Wiggum-esque understanding of the rules of language may be just fine for the next generation of students. According to Professor Sugata Mitra:
Spelling and grammar are “a bit unnecessary because they are skills that were very essential maybe 100 years ago but they are not right now,” Mitra said. “Firstly, my phone corrects my spelling so I don’t really need to think about it and, secondly, because I often skip grammar and write in a cryptic way.”
Anyone who has read letters to Santa from grade school kids knows writing cryptically and without regard for spelling is adorable - though it can be limiting later in life if one doesn’t have a smartphone to check things over.
Mitra is kind of a big deal in academia and beyond, having conducted the experiments introducing internet kiosks to disadvantaged areas in India to demonstrate kids’ ability to learn. Now he’s working building a cloud-based school - where English class is sure to be an easy A.
This is the kind of idiocy that it takes a Ph.D. to come up with. I remember an editorial on Dr. Dobb's Journal years ago calling spelling checkers 'snake oil', and using the following 'sentence' to illustrate: "Now is the tome fur all god men to sump this sneak oil gown the train."-- a sentence every spell checker will not flag a single word in.