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Show OLD ILLITERACY, NEW SPELLING, GET ATTENTION Advocates of simpler spelling swung into action again this week while -other educators concentrated concentrat-ed on means of increasing reading read-ing and writing skill in "good old-fashioned old-fashioned English." Attending a meeting of spelling experts at Columbia University, Dr. Godfrey Dewey, secretary of the Spelling Reform' Assn., presented pre-sented a system of substantially phonetic spelling which uses no new letters. Dr. Dewey asserted that English has the grammatical simplicity and cosmopolitan vocabulary vocab-ulary which makes it the logical world language, except for its intricate in-tricate and disordered spelling. The proposed system would begin be-gin "Linkon's etizberg Adres" like this: "Forskor and sevn yeerz agoe our faadherz braut forth on dhis kontinent a nue naeshun, ' konseeyed in libirti, and dedikat-ed dedikat-ed to dhe propoezishun dhat aul men are wkreeated eekwal." English, as it is today, is a mystery mys-tery to 10,000,000 adults in the country who can neither read nor write, Dr. Stella Center, director of the reading clinic at New York University told the spring conference confer-ence on education at the Woods School, Langhorne, Pa. These statistics sta-tistics are most disturbing, she said, and the number of students graduated from high schools and admitted to high schools without the reading skill to cope with the curriculum should jolt educators into a program of remedial action. |