Was spelling *really* considered very, very important in schools in the past?

[Takver]

I'm asking this because I often see throw-away comments along the lines of 'of course in the past students wouldn't have been able to get away with / get high grades with poor spelling'.

But then my DMum who cannot spell to the extent that her shopping lists often need translation passed the 11+ with flying colours and went to what would now I'm sure be called a superselective grammar. (Apparantly they had one token working class girl, one token black girl and one token Jewish girl in every year - she was the working class one for her year ).

And when I asked how this could be, she says that her recollection was that spelling never counted for more than 2 or 3 % of the marks at any point, therefore it never damaged her exam prospects. Indeed the main suggestion of her teachers to deal with it - rather than remedial teaching as I'm sure she would be getting at school today - was that she should look for a job where she would have a secretary . . .

It was spelling, handwriting and grammar altogether that were given marks in exams IIRC? So bad spelling (provided good enough to be understood) was probably not a huge problem per se.

Incidentally you don't get offered remedial teaching at school today, for bad spelling (or you don't at my DS's school anyway). His teacher's attitude is rather similar to your DMum's - that bad spelling will not harm his exam marks (or NC level) and he can always use a spellchecker in the future.

My Dmum was a secretary for a while and reckons that none of her bosses could ever spell. She also passed her 11+ and went to a grant maintained school.
When I went to school in the 60s and 70s spelling was important, we had tests every week in both primary and secondary. I was told no more than 2 spelling mistakes per page were allowed.
I now have a dyslexic ds who can't spell and has been in top sets for the whole of secondary and I don't get the impression that spelling is not really that important. Even technical terms only have to be phonetically acceptable for science.

2Incidentally you don't get offered remedial teaching at school today, for bad spelling (or you don't at my DS's school anyway)."
My ds did in primary he had one to one for most of year 5 on various spelling schemes.

Incidentally you don't get offered remedial teaching at school today, for bad spelling (or you don't at my DS's school anyway).
My ds did in primary he had one to one for most of year 5 on various spelling schemes.

So bruffin, maybe spelling was important in the 60s/70s (ie after my DM left school) and this is the 'golden age' we hear about? But then I was at school in the 70s and 'modern methods' seemed to get a lot of criticism from older people/the papers et al!

I'm just always a bit baffled by what feels like a constant barrage of 'things were so much better in the past' when I compare that with the spelling/arithmetic/writing that I see when I'm dealing with older people.

Of course I realise that many older people will have left school at 14 or earlier & maybe not attended so much even when they were theoretically of school age. But I think these days most people in their 50s/60s/70s would have come through the education system with compulsory attendance at least to the age of 15.

My Mil 85 has lovely writing and seems to spell well but didn't have much of a secondary education because of the war. My mum 75 again writes and spells well, she left school at 15. But do wonder if the good spellers of her generation became the secretaries and typists to the people who couldn't spell!
I wasn't brilliant at spelling and often only got 7/10 in tests and learnt most of the rules once I left school. We did have a very old fashioned english teacher when I was doing my olevels and he used to give us passages of obscure spellings to learn for weekly tests. I have the name "Cholmondeley" pronounced "Chumley" still engraved on my brain
We were not taught grammer at school either, I think we were meant to absorb it!

I started at primary school in 1973 (yes, I am old) - and throughout school spelling was always an important part of education. The dreaded red pen would be ticking and crossing all pieces of work.

However my sister is 10 years younger than me. Her school didn't pick up on any spelling errors - quoting the "stunting the creativity" stuff.

She can spell now though

shrimp, we're about the same age then I should think - I started school in 1974. Luckily I was a 'natural speller' so it wasn't so much of an issue for me.

bruffin, my DNan was always very reluctant to write/spell anything but then she left school at 12 and I don't think she went regularly even before then so I guess she was the generation before universal education really took hold.

I'm a little older I started school in 67

Child of the sixties here too

We did spelling tests at small village primary, they were dead easy from what I remember. As the school consisted of 40 pupils in total it was a wee bit difficult to set differentiated work, though. But then I always used to be good at spelling and writing at primary.

Secondary - Grammar school - can't recall spelling tests of any kind. Nor much grammar either. When I got to university one of my tutors handed me a copy of Fowlers English Usage and told me to up my game sharpish.

So much for the rigours of old-style Grammar schools and O Levels

I started school in 1970 and spelling was definitely important. I too remember the red pen.

Educated in the 50s and 60s; spelling was definitely important at primary and Grammar school, lots of red pen weilding and writing out incorrect spellings 10 times (a very sound educational practice, by the way...).

I don't know how much it helped with my contemporaries' spelling skills, though. I am one of the lucky ones who found spelling easy.

I do get the sense that we have a much higher proportion now of children and adults who can't spell than we did 30-40 years ago.

Memories, nostalgia and naivety are very unreliable.

Which, taken together, makes our government dangerous.

(or even 'make'!!!

I left school in 1977. During my time at school, spelling was very important, and everything you wrote (no matter the subject) would be corrected.

Grammar, however, was different. We were the generation that weren't taught grammar. My first experience of grammar was learning German (and later, Latin, in the 6th form).

I hate that I have a shaky grasp of grammar, and it has impacted negatively on my learning of other languages. This also despite the fact that I have a degree in Linguistics and Literature!

I hate the fact that my DC have poor spelling, simply because it has been thought that correcting poor spelling was less important than allowing them to 'express themselves'.

My parents (who both happen to be excellent spellers) worked in the legal field but as non lawyers for most of the last 40 years. Their collective view is that over the course of their careers they have come across an extraordinary number of lawyers who have horrendous spelling and grammar, given that the written word is basically all that law is about. They do not think that there's been any obvious deterioration in recent years.

Having said all of that, everytime I got a spelling wrong at secondary school (a significant spelling, that I should have known) I do remember having to write it out 50 or 100 times, during my break time. This could be related to my pretty good spelling / pedantry, today. Does that still happen? (I'm an 80s, kid btw so not that old!).

I know that Josephine Tey's books are full of moans about poor spelling being the result of lousy public-funded education done with trendy methods.

She died in 1952.

I still have the bruises to prove it. They still had the cane in my day and my school didn't believe in dyslexia.

I've been wondering the same Takver; dh who went to Latymer's in the 70s, and then to UCL, has appalling spelling, and most of his university educated colleagues aren't much better; they're all in their fifties.

In my country, poor spelling really was the mark on an uneducated person, so it came as quite a culture shock to come across academics unable to spell.

Well it was at my schools, yes. I started school in 1972.

At my senior school it was considered so important that we actually had weekly spelling tests as part of our "Use of English" exam that we all had to do in Sixth Form. Actually, the fact we all had to do that exam shows how seriously our school took it.

Cory, is Swedish phonetic? My experience in Spain is that everyone can spell apart from those with very little education (quite common there in older people), who mainly make the same errors with confusable sounds.

I wonder if English is different in that it doesn't have simple rules that you can learn, and therefore whilst you can teach spelling up to a point, there will always be people, like my DMum, who just don't/can't 'get' it? And indeed also that methods of helping those who can't spell have progressed now beyond sashh's painful experience or the more enlightened but no more fruitful approach at DMs school?

Popcornia, I agree with you that primary age children are expected to produce work that I'm sure is beyond what we would have done in the 1970s - all these independent projects, evidence based science etc. I'm not sure we even studied science at all at primary, tbh.

Flexybex "Memories, nostalgia and naivety are very unreliable." I think you have it in one.

As well as moans about spelling, I read things like "GCSE students today aren't able to do 'O' level papers from the past". Well, I'm sure that's true. But the question is, would the O level students from 1985, say, have been able to do todays GCSE papers, or is it simply that the content is different?

You know Takver, that's a very interesting question you've posed there (the last one) - I did my O levels in 1983 and I've looked at some questions from GCSEs over the last few years, primarily in Maths and had trouble understanding what they're actually asking for. A lot of the maths questions I saw were more problem-solving than actual pure maths, if that makes sense - I don't remember my GCEs being like that (I did maths O, A/O, and 2 A levels - admittedly it was a long time ago but still!).