Yet another thing for the government to do.

"Should Formal Schooling Be Delayed Until Age Seven?"

"Children should not start formal schooling until the age of seven, bringing the UK in line with many EU countries including Norway, an influential Labour MP has claimed."
--The Telegraph.CO.UK

Of course, they are right. Children should not start school until age seven. But they've missed the important point. Children in English speaking countries don't reach first grade until they've been in school for AT LEAST two years. In other words, children in a school in America or the UK or Canada or Australia will not be able to read and write as well as a first grader in Finland, despite having (at least) two extra years of schooling. This needs to be fixed before we can cut off those first two years.

This delay in education is caused because we have a more complicated writing system. German children do not have to deal with silent e's or k's, in Spain vowels say their names, and in Italy you don't have to worry whether a C is making a /s/ or a /k/ sound. English has one of the most complex phonetic writing systems in the world, and it shows.

Researchers looking at first-year students in 13 European countries found that English was the worst in terms of learnability. English speaking students (in both the UK and America) start school at a much earlier age (60 months vs. 82-91 months in the rest of Europe), but don't catch up to other countries until those other countries have sat about doing nothing for two years and then had first grade. So much for slow and steady wins the race.

"The task of learning to read a deep [complex] orthography generates a much wider variation in rate of initial progress than does the task of learning to read in a shallow [simple] orthography. Scores which reflect the normal variation in Portuguese, French, Danish and English fall within the disability range in the shallow orthographies. In English... the normal range falls close to the non-reader range. Appreciable numbers of English and Danish children remain unable to read after several months in school although a few make rapid progress and read within the normal range for the shallow orthographies."

"The most striking feature is the relative delay in achievement of efficient reading of familiar words by the English-speaking sample. ... The results suggest that a reading age in excess of 7 years is needed before performance converges on the levels which are typical for the first year of learning in the majority of European orthographies."

Seymour, P., Aro, M., & Erskine, J. (2003) Foundation literacy acquisition in European orthographies British Journal of Psychology, 94. 143-174.

Now, it's important to be clear here. We are not talking about bad schools, teachers, parents, or students. We are talking very specifically about a language that takes three years to do what most languages do in one year. It is the language's fault. The language holds back students so much that what we consider normal other countries consider retarded (although they are generally too nice to say anything). English speaking countries have higher rates of dyslexia and learning disabilities because even a small problem in reading comprehension can turn our moronic writing system into an incomprehensible mess.

I've written before about school and spelling reform, and how it would cost nothing and benefit everyone (in the entire world, now that English is becoming a global language) except the older generation who would actually have to get up off their brainstems and do the reform.

In brief, the change to a phonetic writing system would be essentially free: once the government mandated that they were going to use a given system and required its use as soon as materials were available, they can sit back and let the free market do the rest. Some wise publisher will come out with first grade primers in the approved format, and they will have suddenly cornered the market on first grade textbooks in every public school in America. Others will follow suit. First grade teachers will have to learn the new system, but only at the first grade level. I think they can handle it. Second grade teachers will have a year to study up before they have to teach the new system. High school teachers, who will have the most to learn, will have a decade to study before they have to master the new system (they could get a medical degree in that time, and learning the new system would be easier than third grade was -- that's the whole point). Meanwhile, it would be only a few years before publishers started coming out with books written in the new system for new readers. This will cost them a little, but it won't cost taxpayers anything. And keep in mind this isn't a cost we have to mandate. Publishers publish what sells. If all new readers were learning Klingon in school, by god, they'd publish in Klingon! The free market is a great and powerful tool that will do all our work for us.

The end result would be fewer children in special ed., fewer children receiving after-school tutoring, and fewer children requiring SLP services. This would be true not just in grades 1-3, but through highschool; when they say that simplified spelling reduces dyslexia rates and leaning disorders, they mean that across the board. We would have less people with problems throughout their lifespans.

Another result could be, if we like, to drop off the first two years of schooling, at no penalty.

If anyone bothers to comment on this post with questions I will be happy to write about the issues of cultural loss, dialects, and other issues resulting from making a phonetic alphabet and rewriting books into a new orthography. But if you think a bit you should be able to solve these issues yourself; none of them are unsurmountable, and the benefits far outweigh any costs.