I was reading an article from a newly arrived personal computer magazine this
morning and felt that I had to write about a subject in it that beckoned me. Buried in an
article on new advances in computer applications was a short debate about the pros and
cons of the spellcheckers that come as standard features of most word processing programs.
The debate centered on whether our children, in using spellcheckers, would fail to develop
the skills necessary to spell words correctly without electronic help. The piece quoted a
disgruntled parent who obviously had suffered many hours of rote memorization. This mother
wailed loudly that if this current spellchecker tend is continued it will render her
children incapable of advancing into the new order of things. The author of the piece, in
fact, stated that he had already heard a case in which children made fun of a mimeographed
handout by their instructor and laughed amongst themselves that the instructor had not
even used a spellchecker. He had made some minor, common mistakes.
The spellchecker argument is merely an evolution of the hand-held scientific calculator
debate of ten years ago in which parents and educators cried that if the calculators were
used in classes and testing, then the child would never be able to learn the process of
solving math problems. Guess who won the debate? of course, the calculator. While visiting
my daughter who teaches Jr. high school, my wife and I were surprised when students, where
asked to perform a mathematical problem, went up to the front of the class and took
calculators from a large box on her desk. My daughter told us that the current academic
culture in her school feels that the students are better off learning the mechanics of the
machine and not the process of the math, and that the school supplies the calculators to
those who forget to bring them that day. As for the parents and educator's wails of
protests about the loss of fundamental skills -- well, they are absolutely correct. The
brain is similar to muscle tissue in that if you don't use it, you lose it. But I am here
to comfort those parents and educators alike that the reason that this is all occurring is
-- it is suppose to occur.
As technology advances at warp speeds, we poor humans must adapt or be left behind. What
is occurring is merely the normal adaptation necessary in each new generation responding
to a changing world with the basic skills necessary to survive. The students mentioned in
the computer magazine, along with millions of other students around the country, have
decided that the spellchecker invention is a pretty nifty idea!! And yours truly, who
suffers from lexical agraphia ( one who has no difficulty in speaking, listening, or
reading, but has problems with the writing process -- which includes spelling) -- thinks
that the spellchecker is a gift from God. It has released me from a prison of frustration
and endless bouts of negative self-esteem. It has allowed me to increase my writing output
by at least 1000 per cent. To me, I think of it as an electronic prosthesis for my brain.
As for the mechanics of the spellchecker, what is being accepted by our students across
the planet, and eventually adapted to, is the new process of checking one's spelling in a
faster and more accurate manner. What is basically happening is a pre-genetic adaptation
without the genetics. Our species adapts by finding solutions to a negative local
environment. The simple adage: "If it ain't broke don't fix it," hits us over
the head with logic in regards to genetics. Adaptation/evolution will not occur if the
local environment is acceptable or positive by the organism. But with our complex brains,
we humans never seem to be satisfied. When we are faced with a difficult task, we begin to
use our problem-solving abilities. If the situation is not resolved and we are continued
to be plagued by the problem, the situation then can be considered negative. By negative,
I mean that negative chemical reactions are occurring within our brains which are causing
our brains to look for an end to the negative chemical balance. We are in angst because of
the difficulties presented to us in our modern visual-oriented world. The situation must
seem even more overwhelming to our spellchecker hating adults. Adults are confounded by
the flood of new technologies and procedures that must be met in order to survive in this
technological world. Have you learned to program your VCR yet? Does your child?
The reason for the matter-of-fact acceptance of the science calculator and the
spellchecker by students is because the devices are more useful to today's students. The
students have accepted the spellchecker because it allows the brain to eliminate
unnecessary mapping areas and their physical interaction circuits in the constant flux of
a changing, more difficult environment. It helps to shorten the learning curve when time
is most important. The emergence of the WWW and the new information available on it
creates a need in the brain to learn this new information in a more rapid pace. Because of
the tremendous advantage in using the device, it was only a matter of time before the word
spread by the social interaction we call gossip, that if one uses the spellchecker one
finds that life is a bit easier for doing so.
As for the argument that a valuable process will be lost: Well, it is just part of our
evolutionary march. I get my food at the grocery store down the street, not in the wooded
area behind my house. And guess what? I would not know how to get food from the wooded
area behind my house because I do not know the first thing about hunting little furry
animals or spindly bugs for my food. And guess what else? I don't want to spend the time
trying, either, because it would take too much time to relearn (reestablish neural links
and drag up archival memories) the old processes which, in turn, would take the focus away
from my current survival methods of educating myself about, among other things, the
internet and the WWW. If a giant asteroid or comet would fall upon the earth and create
the same negative environment that faced our dinosaur ancestors, would I starve? Perhaps,
if I were weak of strength and poor of spirit. But if the fire of survival were burning
bright, I would find a way. So would you. I'm not really worried, science is advancing at
such a rapid rate that I know someday we will all have bio-microchip implants which will
give us access to all the processes that have allowed us to evolve past the necessity for
such skills. The biggest mistake the persons encoding these microchip memory enhances may
make, however, is to forget to leave a trail of bread crumbs back to the reruns of the
1950's TV show Leave-it-to-Beaver.
December, 1995
Updated: April 1997
Former Title: THE SPELLCHECKER AND EVOLUTION
Copyright, Evolution's Voyage & William A. Spriggs, 1995 - 2011