However, I still find the idea that the warlike powers that be were behind the dumbing-down of education impossible to buy into. For myself, I blame the self-esteem movement. War hawks have never struck me as being big on promoting self-esteem.

I’m not sure how seriously you meant that bit, or if you were just throwing it out there, but if you really believe this, and if you can connect the dots for me, in terms of laying out how you came to that conclusion, I’d be fascinated to read it.

“It’s far easier to maintain a massive standing army ready to fight and die for no reason other than “the President says it’s cool” if you don’t teach them to think for themselves in the first place.”

Nope, not there.

You blame the wussification of education on *Republicans*?!

o_O

“A small independent press is so desperate for material it doesn’t matter if my writing, spelling and grammar suck.”

As for illiterate reviewers, you haven’t lived until you’ve waded through one of their works and found, in the last paragraph, “…and the editing was terrible.”

In other words, there IS a “reader conspiracy” not because they aren’t capable of seeing the errors but because they believe they aren’t errors to begin with.

I think it’s pathetic that they’re not much better than someone who never had any formal education in English

Perhaps that’s because they’ve had no formal education in English as well. Certainly not at school.

a) The Hobbit is a children’s book. Reading it at 8 is no proof of genius.

b) What difference does it make if mathematicians have atrocious spelling? Are they writing fiction? I’m sure they know how to add and subtract.

c) Mathematics is a terrible counterexample. Mathematicians are simply not permitted to make mistakes. When a flaw was found in Andrew Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, it took a year of work to resolve.

d) It makes no sense to argue that poor spelling isn’t important because (some) writers have poor math skills — if indeed that’s what you’re arguing, because your point isn’t clear.

e) English orthography may be complex and “silly” at times, but we’re stuck with it. Remembering how to spell words correctly isn’t that hard. The acceptance of misspellings makes orthography even more complex and silly.

f) Knowing how to spell correctly gives a writer the opportunity to use deliberate misspelling for effect, as Queneau used to do.

f) Queneau was French. As Steve Martin once said, “It’s like they have a different word for everything.”