[burzum]

I'm not hostile to the spelling bee or the child in it. I'm hostile to the stupidity of our spelling system and the needless energy we spend learning spelling when we could have a standardized system. The spelling bee is just an example of how this stupidity is manifested. The great advances in English spelling in the last 300 years has been pretty much centre to center and colour to color. In contrast, most other languages have adapted at least to some degree to standardizing spelling and accentuation, with the Spanish language being the cleanest example. Are you really happy with having 12 ways to make the 'sh' sound, 14 ways to make the hard 'o' sound, 20 ways to make the hard 'i' sound, etc.? We have students memorizing hundreds of different ways to spell words that could be standardized instead of learning word meanings or other subjects. It is such a huge waste of energy.

[zeugma]

We have students memorizing hundreds of different ways to spell words that could be standardized instead of learning word meanings or other subjects. It is such a huge waste of energy.

LOL. You are certainly welcome to take up esperanto. 

[HiTech RedNeck]

with the Spanish language being the cleanest example.

Classical Spanish maybe. But how about various argots of it. Languages spoken by people who just want to talk about things without asking the dictionary editors how, WILL break the rules.

[wintertime]

I’m not hostile to the spelling bee or the child in it. I’m hostile to the stupidity of our spelling system and the needless energy we spend learning spelling when we could have a standardized system.

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We are stuck with it.

If we invented a more rational way to spell the English language, then all of us would need to learn two methods of reading and spelling. One to read the new material being printed, and the other to read the old material that was still in the old form. Since not everything would be translated into the new form, a great body of human knowledge would be forever lost.

[TomSmedley]

We have students memorizing hundreds of different ways to spell words that could be standardized instead of learning word meanings or other subjects. It is such a huge waste of energy.

Yet a ready learner can master English with about 30 hours of intense phonics instruction. True, our spelling system has some bizarre outliers -- including one sound that hasn't been pronounced in 500-1000 years, but still must be included in words like light, thought, though, tough, enough ... and our most common vowel, the schwa, has no letter of its own!

However, a simplified orthography would cut us off from our legacy, our patrimony. For some folks, this is a great idea. Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, imposed a latinate alphabet upon his subjects over the course of six intense months -- and put 500 years' worth of Ottoman archives beyond the reach of all but specialists. Chairman Mao's "simplified Mao script" cut his people off from their literary heritage.

(BTW -- I own a book designed for Turkish sojourners that lists common English phrases, their Turkish equivalents, and the English phonetically spelled out in the Turkish alphabet. It's entertaining to see how others hear us!)