I am learning to go on with my daily life despite corruption and imbecility in the White House. I am developing personal acceptance that all three branches of our federal government, much of our state government and oftentimes our local government are either directly controlled by or at the beck and call of selfish, malevolent interests. I’ve come to understand the new American ethos, that the rules don’t matter, that the ends justify the means, and that winning is everything.
Still, I can’t get over the death of the spelling bee.
The school spelling bee once was an accepted ritual in my town and in our country, akin to Groundhog Day or the president throwing the first pitch on opening day of the baseball season. It’s soon to go away in my hometown, but in other places it’s becoming professionalized. Like everything else in this country, it’s losing its middle class.
At our current rate, we will soon become a nation of 1 percent who can spell, and 99 percent who can’t. The fate of the spelling bee is a crystallized symbol of a significant change in American life – the abandonment of general obligations.
At one time, spelling was taught in our public and private schools, and for good reason. The written word is one of the most effective – if not the most effective – way to spread ideas. For written communication to work well, some uniformity is required. That is, the written words themselves must be recognizable, requiring some standards for spelling. Other language standards rightly apply to definitions of words, grammar, etc.
Language is a code and the code must be used with a certain precision for its message to be clearly understood.
So students were taught that there are familiar patterns of spelling, that the spelling of certain words can be “sounded out” and other words that defy spelling patterns must be memorized. No heavy lifting there.
To make spelling a bit more interesting and to gauge individual student proficiency, class spelling bees were created, a chance for students to compete in spelling, much as they continue to compete in basketball or football. Class champions competed for school spelling champ, then on to bees to find the best speller in the district, the state and the nation.
At the classroom level of competition, a bee added some stress to the school day, but so did homework, report cards, childhood crushes, and forgetting your lunch. We were all in the bee together, we all survived it, and our spelling likely improved a bit because of it.
Teachers and parents, however, have lost their appetite for the bee. Spell-check, it was claimed, diminished the importance of knowing how to spell. Parents derided the bee as antiquated and unnecessary. Meagan Francis, a Michigan mom of 5, writer and co-host of The Mom Hour podcast, wrote in a recent commentary to NBC News:
“These days, success is determined not by the data stored in your personal memory bank but by how nimble you can be in accessing the endlessly available information stored elsewhere. And to me, the spelling bee stands out as a particularly outdated ritual that embodies the disconnect between the way kids are still expected to learn and the world they’ll navigate once school is over.”
Francis says she’s no snowflake mom and that she doesn’t like participation trophies. She’s just being practical, and her thinking is prevailing.
This year in Haines, Alaska, only one student speller was interested in a bee, but the school indulged her, asking her words until she missed one, then crowning her district champion. The district’s bee almost ended altogether around five years ago, when a former superintendent declared it, “a bridge too far.” When her declaration reached the front page of our local newspaper, people became concerned, but apparently her pronouncement was not premature. Our bee is all but dead.
On the other extreme, the national bee is becoming more competitive. The best student spellers are getting better at it (the national bee saw an eight-way tie this year) and the rules recently were changed to allow “wild cards,” competition by students who didn’t win their state or regional bees. Tellingly, wild cards are allowed in only by paying a $1,500 entry fee and paying their own expenses. In other words, spellers from wealthy families get a second chance.
It’s hard to know where to begin in countering all this, but this much is clear: As a culture, we’ve both abandoned the bee and corrupted it.
On the local level, we’ve abandoned it because of hubris. By the same logic that diminishes the importance of spelling, an understanding of mathematics became unnecessary with the invention of the pocket calculator. “We have machines to do that” has led us to so many bad places including raising a generation that can’t wash dishes, drive a stick shift or tie a decent knot.
The belief that someone or something else will automatic provide us with knowledge, alleviating us of the burden of acquiring it personally, has created a generation without basic skills and, in some cases, without even the confidence of their ability to acquire them.
Spelling is not a specialty skill, nor is it higher-level thinking. Bees test students on their proficiency in a basic skill. Why is this bridge too far?
On the national level, we’ve corrupted the bee by making it too important. Being good at spelling is an admirable and helpful trait. But for adults, it’s not as important as curing cancer. And for students, it’s not even as important as treating classmates respectfully.
The importance of spelling bees falls into what was once the great American middle, a place where you had an obligation to learn some basic skills, and to improve on them in the interest of becoming a better person and citizen.
And the middle, very ominously, is disappearing.