The annual Scripps National Spelling Bee concluded with the usual spectacle: children of immigrant parents, mostly Indian-American, obliterating words that would make a Victorian lexicographer blush. Meanwhile, British educators are having a quiet chuckle. Our curriculum, they note, still demands that a 12-year-old knows the difference between 'practice' and 'practise', 'licence' and 'license'.
In America, the bee is a freakish anomaly, a gladiatorial contest of memorisation divorced from daily usage. But across the pond, it is merely a metric of what we expect from every child: rigour, etymology, and a respect for the language's chaotic history. The American system, obsessed with self-esteem and 'engagement', produces winners who can spell 'cymotrichous' but cannot parse a sentence from Shakespeare.
Britain, by contrast, does not celebrate spelling bees because we have no need. Our schools still teach Latin roots, grammatical precision, and the joy of a well-turned phrase. The bee's winners are a rebuke to the US education establishment: you have traded substance for spectacle.
We, the Victorians of the modern age, know that language is the foundation of empire. Without it, you are merely barbarians with iPads.
