Apparently we should abandon teaching children how to spell properly because it wastes time in the classroom. And the same for punctuation and grammar. All proclaimed by the president of the Spelling Society, no less.

This is an absolutely stupid idea. Unless we teach our children how to spell and use punctuation and grammar properly, how on earth are we to have any way of conducting real communication? Remove correct spellings, punctuation and grammar from a sentence and it becomes complete gibberish.

Just try out the classic joke about mispunctuation:

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons.

‘Why?’ asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

‘Well, I’m a panda’, he says, at the door. ‘Look it up.’

The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation. ‘Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.’

The thing is, even text speak relies on a basic knowledge of real English. Without a knowledge of it, no language means anything. No matter the way that it is changed, it requires the basic structure – without that understanding it means nothing.

There is no denying that English is a complicated language. But that’s no excuse for no having kids learn it.