Does Spelling Matter?
Simon Horobin
Oxford University Press, 288pp, £20
Do you remember the “initial teaching alphabet” (ITA)? If you are in your late forties or early fifties, you may well. It was designed by James Pitman, grandson of the shorthand inventor Isaac, to make it easier for children to learn to read. I missed it by about two or three years but my younger brother was less fortunate. He appeared as a result to be semiliterate until about the age of 12. Many other children had the same fate; by the 1970s, the idea had been widely abandoned.
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