creast productivity resulting from the earlier entry of successiv generations of students into the ranks of labor, business, and the professions.
Future Benefits the Criterion
The actual saving in time, and correspondingly in expense, wil depend on the extent to which the simplification of spelling is carrid. The worth-whileness of the movement must be judgd, accordingly, not by the saving actually made by the simplifications proposed now, but by the savings that may be effected at later stages of a progressiv advance—of which the present proposals ar but the first step—toward a completely simplified spelling.
No Spelling Books in Spain and Italy
Fonetic spelling, in one form or another, has been, and is now, used by progressiv teachers in England and America as an introduction and an aid to the study of the current orthografy. Their experience is that children can spel correctly—that is, fonetically—the words they ar able to pronounce, as soon as they hav learnd the alfabet employd, and the principle of combining letters into sillables.
In languages such as Italian and Spanish, that hav approximately fonetic alfabets, approximately similar conditions prevail. There ar no spelling-books among the scool-texts of those countries for the sufficient reason that there is no need of them. So difficult is English spelling that two of the eight years spent in the grades ar needed by the average pupil to acquire an imperfect and uncertain acquaintance with it. If it could be brought to the same degree of fonetic exactness as the spelling of Italy or Spain, practically all
