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 . . .

That's because we have auto correct, for all it's faults, on our iPods and global spell check on our PCs.

Even then I have to resort to the amazing fuzzy match on Goggle, occasionally.
Goggles spell checker is incredible, even when I have total brain fade it seems to know what I mean. I think it must record what people write and which search they go to. I guess a lot of my wild sounds like guesses are what non English speakers might try.