Alan Mole, a member of the board of the American Literacy Council, which wants to change English spelling by dropping silent letters, for example, was lukewarm about a network broadcast.
"I suppose it's a good thing that the whole issue of spelling gets more publicity," he said in an interview. "The major criticism of the bee is it celebrates rote learning whereas children should be learning to think."
What a colossal douche.
I'll disregard his want to drop silent letters from the English language to address his second absurdity, that the kids aren't actually
learning anything, but rather
memorizing via repetition.
A basic M-W Collegiate Dictionary contains about 220,000 words. An M-W Unabridged Dictionary contains about 450,000 words. The OED2 (Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition) that The Scripps National Spelling Bee selects from contains over 615,000 words.
I don't buy the criticism that the bee celebrates rote learning. First, these kids aren't exactly memorizing the Oxford English Dictionary word-for-word. Second, the kids are constructing educated guesses to word spellings based on definitions and word origins, which is highly critical thinking for the mind of, say, an eight year old.
While learning some languages, such as Latin, does indeed require repetitive pattern learning, deducing which vowels appear in a word you've never heard before based on whether the word origin is Latin or Greek is a skill which requires critical thinking.
Frankly, it is something I really wish I would have applied myself towards more when I was little -- this makes learning foreign languages later in life much simpler. The child who memorizes foreign constructs early will comprehend and retain foreign languages better in high school, whereas a child who is not introduced to foreign languages early will be forced to apply rote learning techniques just to get through Spanish I & II in high school; this is the person that will forget everything except 'Hola' and 'Uno, Dos, Tres' two years later.
