Spelling Society To Picket Washington Bee

The Spelling Society
www.spellingsociety,org
 

Hamilton Student Off To Washington Spelling Final

This week [26-28 May, US time], Hamilton Boys' High School student Christopher Jury will be the sole New Zealand competitor in the Scripps National Spelling Bee finals in Washington, DC. The event is an American tradition and will feature on US national prime-time television.
 
It is in its 82nd year, and this year drew over nine million entries nationwide. Competitors range in age from 9-15 years old.
 
Scripps claims it is America's "largest and longest-running educational promotion."  It aims to "help students improve their spelling, increase their vocabularies, learn concepts, and develop correct English usage that will help them all their lives".
 
The London-based Spelling Society, together with the American Literacy Council, will stage a picket outside the venue to raise awareness of the problems English spelling causes. The society claims the bee has not achieved its high aims. Two comparable recent surveys by the society of adults' spelling ability in both the US and the UK (which rarely has spelling bees) have found little difference in results from both nations, with the Americans' results slightly poorer than those of the British. 
 
Spelling Society chair Jack Bovill asks: "Have spelling bees in all their years helped to improve national spelling skills in the USA? The answer is an emphatic No. Consistently, without spelling skills, the US and the UK turn out citizens from their schools to be economic drop-outs, unable to spell competently and thus suffering from word poverty and then economic poverty. This does not have to be so. Look at our two recent surveys. The poor spelling shown in them cannot be the children, the schools, the parents or the governments since they are all different in each nation. It has to be something else."
 
The society says the bee competitors are exceptional, and not the norm. They are the "Olympians of spelling". It also says that all English-speaking nations have similarly unacceptable literacy standards because of spelling problems, which need more than spelling bees to correct.
 
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