I briefly worked as a teacher for comp sci, math, and physics at a local high school. Luckily, I hardly ever had to interact with people higher up in the education hierarchy (DOE) but everytime I did, there was this attitude of "you know nothing about how to teach, we know everything". Like, you have to use tablets in math class these days, what am I thinking suggesting that pen and paper is appropriate??
The more I think about it, I can't help but think that pedagogy is borderline quackery. If you read articles like this (and that's certainly not the only one), you realize pretty quickly that there is little scientific basis and a lot of it is just plain guess work. And it all comes with this air of self-confidence that is really not grounded in reality.
And don't get me wrong: I'm not against proposing a learning theory and then verifying or falsifying it empirically. But that's not really what's happening when you force some wild out-there method on a whole generation of students, only to find out years later that, oh, maybe that was all baloney. I mean, besides my foray into teaching I actually worked in academia for most of my career, and everytime you apply for funding for anything that's remotely related to user experiments, you must get ethics clearing, and that's not a joke. I'm amazed that new bogey teaching methods are so easily introduced and made mandatory in our school system with apparently no ethical considerations.
The sad thing is that this isn't even a one-off. Education has been repeatedly rocked by "someone had a whacky idea and now it's the law of the land". The original "New Math", and several things after it labelled "New Math". "Whole word" reading, and a whole zoo of related "what if we took how we've been successfully teaching reading and just hypothesized that something else might work better maybe" initiatives. The concept of "learning modes", which everyone believes is real but science strongly suggests don't exist very strongly at all. The solution to every educational problem being to push standardized testing even harder. Just over and over.
IIRC, New Math (at least the original) had the strongest pilot success of the lot. However, it failed in mass adoption because teachers didn’t want to retrain and parents threw fits that they could no longer drill their kids in math facts using half-remembered methods from their schooling.
Having taught for about 15 years, your feeling that pedagogy, as taught in most professional development sessions, is quackery, is not wrong. There are so many hucksters writing books and doing seminars.
maria montessori developed her education methods using scientific experimentation with good outcomes.[0]
various ways to teach have been tried and we know the results. it is baffling to me why the ones that work aren't applied more.
of course not all of them are universally suitable. waldorf for example apparently also has decent results, but if there is one that i would put on the top of the list of education quackery, then waldorf would be it. so where do the good results come from? because they do one thing right: "Its educational style is holistic, intended to develop pupils' intellectual, artistic, and practical skills, with a focus on imagination and creativity. Individual teachers have a great deal of autonomy in curriculum content, teaching methods, and governance."[1], which is something that could be applied without basing it on steiners esoteric ideas.
it looks like it is not just quackery that is the problem. it is politics, NIH, probably the unwillingness to admit that they are wrong. unwillingness to change. in that context it is surprising that ITA got even off the ground. but it is also wierd that apparently the reason ITA fell out of fashion was not because it failed on its own but because that educational theory turned away from phonics.[2] that's like one mistake cancelling out another. even more surprising is that the ita foundation appears to be still active.
With that kind of "separate specialist school" setup I think you would also need to be careful when analysing outcomes to avoid confounding effects from "the parents are actively interested and engaged in their childrens' education, and have the resources to support it", which I suspect is pretty well correlated with good outcomes.
Don't worry. The pushing of tablets will soon be gone! To be replaced by the pushing of tablets with AI. Because it is inevitable, so they better get used to it in every aspect of their educational career.
I wish I could state with certainty that this post is a hyperbolic piece of irony.
It's funny - you would think that this new generation of "digital natives" is already so apt with everything IT-related that they could use their tablets like wizards and give additional value to the classroom that even surprises their teacher!
In reality, however, >90% of the high school students I encountered were on the level of your grandparents 20 years ago. Like, say, they actually have trouble finding a file again they saved - mostly, because they don't even have a concept of the file system (thanks, mobile OS's!).
In C. S. Lewis' "That Hideous Strength", a character observes that no parent would ever let people experiment on their children, but they will happily send their children to an experimental school.
I mean that isn't true. Parents let people experiment on their children all the time it is how we test new medicines and such on them. My daughter was part of a clinical trial. On the other hand I would probably feel more cautious about sending them to an experimental school as that is a much longer time-frame to try and understand and will have a big impact on their social and academic life.
> The more I think about it, I can't help but think that pedagogy is borderline quackery
I had this high school computing studies teacher, I’ll call her Dr B. She knew absolutely nothing about the subject she was supposed to be teaching us, but was beaming with pride as she told us about her PhD in education, for which she sat in on university-level engineering classes - she claimed she didn’t need to understand engineering to understand how engineering students learn
That said, once upon a time, I happened to stumble upon an education PhD thesis which I enjoyed reading and personally thought had something worthwhile to say: https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/10373/ - even though I live on the other side of the planet, its accounts of the personal experiences of parents resonated with some of my own experiences
Not that I disagree with your overall point, but it's worth noting that in this case it wasn't enforced top-down:
> Even more puzzling is the way the system was rolled out. ITA was never adopted nationally, nor required. As Stainthorp explains: “At that time, there was no national curriculum – a headteacher could simply decide to implement it in their school, or a teacher in their class. There was no consistency.”
There are quite a few examples of very misguided educational strategies.
Whole Language[1] failed so many students, but had significant funding and guru-level support for decades. Brain Gym[2] is regarded as pseudoscience. Even Discovery Learning has had serious detractors.
Liljedahl's "Building Thinking Classrooms" is the current poster child for this. Hugely influential in educational circles, but inconsistent with most of the reproducible research in cognitive science and likely quite deleterious to learning.
Bingo! It's exactly stuff like that that I had in mind. And I also pity the parents whose kids have to endure this nonsense instead of getting a proper education. I mean, you basically have no power. You give your kids to whatever the government's idea is of an education and all you can do is watch helplessly from the side.
People who are alive forget that there are people who know nothing stopping all born every day. Each thing we add to the "tutorial level" is going to have to be paid by the next generation.
Plain guess work, and excitement, and fads, and people profiting from being "the experts", and in general social noise that overcomplicates the simplicity of life.
A lot of it is, I would agree, and I think the increase in homeschooling is partly motivated by that belief.
The basic question that needs to be asked: what is education for? What is its intended aim? The answer given will vary depending on the anthropology or vision of the human person that a particular culture has absorbed or that a culture has been organized around, though usually, I don't think this question is explicitly asked. It is a dangerous question, because it makes a person realize that perhaps better aims exist.
So, in capitalistic societies like ours, education has been reduced to what the capitalist class wants it to be, which is the production of cogs for the machine (and secondarily, a method of extracting money for what I take to be a mediocre education). This much is obvious. What do primary schools say college education is for? To get a "good job". The job is the primary focus of education in such a society. Test results are more about funneling workers into industry than helping students attain intellectual maturity and to gain insight into discerning their vocation.
(This is not an endorsement of collectivism, btw. Both hyperindividualism and collectivism are founded on a fantastically wrong vision of the human person; solidarism is by far the best account of the proper norm.)
But this is not the classical view of education whose aim was the formation of the person so that he can be free to be more fully human, of which the ability to known and understand the truth and to reason about life and the world are central. Intellectual formation presupposes moral formation as well (of which parents are taken to be the primary and first educators). This realization has caused an increase of interest in curricula such as classical liberal education which draws from the trivium/quadrivium tradition.
The biggest takeaway here is that we need to start asking fundamental questions questions again. We need to be Socratic again. We need to pay attention to first principles and to reconnect with our traditions to see what they have to say about them. The idea that you can do a better job by throwing inherited tradition overboard and starting from scratch is not only patently arrogant on its face, but has been demonstrated empirically to be disastrous.)
In this case, I cannot understate the importance of asking what it means to be human. Every society, every political order, every culture is guided by some anthropology, however implicit.
A quote for thought:
"Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about."
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
I confess, I miss some of the experimental teaching techniques they tried in the late 60's. Education was a surprisingly dynamic field it seems.
In the U.S. my mom moved my sister and I into a new public school for what would have been my 4th grade.
What an odd school it was compared to the previous public schools I had been to. For starters, I was not in 4th grade, I was in Community 5 (I assume that Kindergarten was Community 1, so they decided to toss the zero-based system I was used to.) I seem to recall they had combined 5th and 6th grade into something called Suite 67.
The school itself was circular in construction with a sunken library in the center of the circle — the wedge-shaped classes going radially around the library. (If it sounds like Moon Base from Space 1999, I suspect it's because everyone in the 70's were drinking the same Koolaid.)
Classes were "open". While there were enough students to form two or more classes per grade, er, community, our community did not have a single teacher but a few. So you might have one teacher and learn reading, writing, and then later in the day another teacher would step in for science, math.
I believe the two teachers swapped and would teach the other group in Community 5 — the other group getting Math and Science in the early part of the day, English after.
And it was described as "open" and I believe that to mean that the two Community 5 classes had no physical wall between them. I don't remember though And, yeah, I know, sounds like trying to watch one movie at a drive-in while another screen is showing something else. I believe though there was perhaps some theory involving osmosis or some-such.
I remember clearly, now almost fifty years later, at least two of the science experiments we did in Community 5. They involved experiments with a control group, collecting data (one involving the effects of sunlight on bean plant growth, the other on the temperature preferences of isopods). They had definitely nailed that curriculum.
It was also where I was introduced to the Metric System (that Reagan would shitcan some years later).
When, a few years back, I went back to Overland Park, Kansas to try and find the school I was sad to see that it had been torn down and a standard rectilinear building in its place. No memory from the front desk staff about its wild history.
Wow, was reading through this with a relatively detached interest and had to reread a few times to overcome the whiplash of you naming the city in which I attended elementary, middle, and high school.
If it’s any consolation, the modern Blue Valley school district is still considered excellent [0]. And there are still a few interesting ideas being pursued. The CAPS center [1] had some cool things going on when I graduated in 2018.
Ha ha, which schools? I can list Pawnee, Apache, Comanche, Somerset, Meadowbrook and Shawnee Mission East (although the latter ones were in Prairie Village, KS).
Yeah, we moved around the 'burbs a bit.
Also: another experimental "Free" school in the 1970's for one year was P.A.C.E.R.S. in KCMO, and then a partial year at a Catholic School in KCMO: Saint Francis Xavier, ha ha.
There was a similar round school in Farmville, Va. which afforded children within walking distance an education _and_ local college students an easy/convenient student teacher position, which sadly has apparently also been demolished.
I encountered this in 1968. This was at Clarinda State School, in grade 1. The 1A class used ITA, and 1B used proper latin alphabet. My best friend, Steve Irwin (yes, _that_ Steve Irwin. Everyone had to go to school somewhere) was in 1A. Every afternoon after school he'd come to my place and we'd go through our readers for the day. I'd read the English one to him, and he'd memorise it to recite (pretending to read) to his teacher the next day. I assume he was taught properly when he moved to Queensland in 1969.
I can't imagine how hard it was for people less bright than Steve. No wonder the scheme trained illiterates.
Bright, but it sounds like he was also overcompensating. Many celebs, leaders in thier respective fields, get there by being massive good at something. Often they get that good as mental cover for some other self-percieved failure. The drive required to be the absolute best is itself rather unnatural, requiring some sort of trigger. Being a totally friendly extrovert seems a logical cover for poor reading ability.
I've taken my time to respond to this. Firstly, that's a big statement about someone you only know from TV.
Secondly, he was one of the most functional human beings I've ever met.
The reason he was so good at herpetology is because he was raised with dangerous reptiles. The backyard of his home in Botany Circuit was crawling with snakes, crocs and goannas. I rarely played at his place, because it un-nerved me. He was very confident and capable, and understood animal behaviour even at 6yo.
I was better at playing with spiders though, no doubt that changed as he grew older.
Wild. I can read this, no problem, and I can see that it is a clear improvement over standard letters and spelling. Latin letters are (quite literally) a poor match for the English language. They don't match the sounds required to speak English.
I'm not sure if this is a valuable teaching tool, but I think it would be conceptually sound as a general replacement for Latin letters for English text. At this point, though, it's impossible to make such a drastic change. It would have global repercussions.
I think the issue is that, missing a clear correlation between spelling and sound, there's no unique pronunciation for words across countries and accents. Trivial example: data. It's either "dayta" or "dahta". Or privacy- pri-vuh-see or prai-vuh-see. You'd have to choose one.
When I was in school in the 80's, I remember seeing these books stacked up at the back of the classroom. There were other Ladybird books in English standard spelling (they were really common), but these were weird. The teacher just told us to ignore them. But weirdly, the text is really easy to read int he examples given. I never used or even read the ones in my youth, so it must just be easy for my brain to process (disclaimer, I am a speaker of basic Swedish and a little Norwegian, so I am used to reading words with odd spellings and going "oh right, that is X in English.")
ITA looks like the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to me.
I like that. If all English text was written in this way it'd be really easy to learn (at least for me). It reads like a breeze.
I agree. As an Italian (where you read exactly what you say and you say exactly what you read) it was straightforward to read. I have always wondered why English has so many weird pronunciation exceptions.
The standard joke is that English isn't actually a language: it's three languages stacked on top of each other wearing a trench coat, which go around beating up other languages and rifling through their pockets for loose vocabulary and spare grammar. This is funny because it's true.
Modern Italian, on the other hand, makes a modicum of sense because it was explicitly constructed during the 19th-century unification of Italy, when somebody had the bright idea that if you wanted to have a nation called "Italy", you should also have a language called "Italian" and it should make a modicum of sense. This is a memo which English has somehow never gotten.
The sibling comments are good answers. Another factor is the fact that written English goes back a long time. In some cases, pronunciation has drifted over time, but the spelling didn't change. The silent k's in words like knight and knife were not always silent, for example, but you have to go back to old English for them to be pronounced.
> where you read exactly what you say and you say exactly what you read
surely there are regional accents of Standard Italian where different people say the same word different ways though, right? Does everyone speak it the same way and save variation for their local dialect?
Another factor is, sometimes different forms of words have different pronunciations (because of the phonology of English), but often the same spelling: compare "electric" where the final "c" has a hard K sound, and "electricity", where he same "c" has an S sound. The pronunciation change is predictable, but the spelling retains continuity between the two pronunciations. It breaks the idea of 1-to-1 relationships between sounds and spellings, but in these kinds of situations, I think it's a good thing.
Because we nicked so many words from so many different other languages, and kept (to some extent) their so many different spellings and pronunciations.
> And many letter combinations contradict one another across different words: think of “through”, “though” and “thought”.
I live in Germany now but I'm American. The poem "dearest creature in creation" is always a fun party trick. German is difficult but it's a good reminder that English is, too.
If you're a non-native English speaker and you can get this poem even 50% correct you're doing really well. Most Americans (and, I'd imagine, other English native speakers) would also struggle with it.
The fact it is so long, underlines the magnitude of the problem.
English is one of THE WORST languages when it comes to encoding its phonemes in its alphabet.
I am familiar with pretty much every word in that poem. Knowing the word isn't the problem. How these words are correctly PRONOUNCED though, that is the actual issue. And even I got tripped up on some of them.
I think the problem with the ITA, or other reform schemes, is that they try to change too much at once. So the new system looks silly and alien to existing speakers, and there's a backlash.
If I were reforming English spelling, I'd take a much slower, more incremental approach. Make a simple change like SR1[0], that doesn't change that many words. Smaller change; less backlash.
(And even in the worst case, if the reform doesn't take, it's easier for the people who learned it to re-learn "classic English" spelling.)
Readit News
The more I think about it, I can't help but think that pedagogy is borderline quackery. If you read articles like this (and that's certainly not the only one), you realize pretty quickly that there is little scientific basis and a lot of it is just plain guess work. And it all comes with this air of self-confidence that is really not grounded in reality.
And don't get me wrong: I'm not against proposing a learning theory and then verifying or falsifying it empirically. But that's not really what's happening when you force some wild out-there method on a whole generation of students, only to find out years later that, oh, maybe that was all baloney. I mean, besides my foray into teaching I actually worked in academia for most of my career, and everytime you apply for funding for anything that's remotely related to user experiments, you must get ethics clearing, and that's not a joke. I'm amazed that new bogey teaching methods are so easily introduced and made mandatory in our school system with apparently no ethical considerations.
Dead Comment
maria montessori developed her education methods using scientific experimentation with good outcomes.[0]
various ways to teach have been tried and we know the results. it is baffling to me why the ones that work aren't applied more.
of course not all of them are universally suitable. waldorf for example apparently also has decent results, but if there is one that i would put on the top of the list of education quackery, then waldorf would be it. so where do the good results come from? because they do one thing right: "Its educational style is holistic, intended to develop pupils' intellectual, artistic, and practical skills, with a focus on imagination and creativity. Individual teachers have a great deal of autonomy in curriculum content, teaching methods, and governance."[1], which is something that could be applied without basing it on steiners esoteric ideas.
it looks like it is not just quackery that is the problem. it is politics, NIH, probably the unwillingness to admit that they are wrong. unwillingness to change. in that context it is surprising that ITA got even off the ground. but it is also wierd that apparently the reason ITA fell out of fashion was not because it failed on its own but because that educational theory turned away from phonics.[2] that's like one mistake cancelling out another. even more surprising is that the ita foundation appears to be still active.
WAT?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldorf_education
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_Teaching_Alphabet
I wish I could state with certainty that this post is a hyperbolic piece of irony.
In reality, however, >90% of the high school students I encountered were on the level of your grandparents 20 years ago. Like, say, they actually have trouble finding a file again they saved - mostly, because they don't even have a concept of the file system (thanks, mobile OS's!).
I had this high school computing studies teacher, I’ll call her Dr B. She knew absolutely nothing about the subject she was supposed to be teaching us, but was beaming with pride as she told us about her PhD in education, for which she sat in on university-level engineering classes - she claimed she didn’t need to understand engineering to understand how engineering students learn
That said, once upon a time, I happened to stumble upon an education PhD thesis which I enjoyed reading and personally thought had something worthwhile to say: https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/10373/ - even though I live on the other side of the planet, its accounts of the personal experiences of parents resonated with some of my own experiences
> Even more puzzling is the way the system was rolled out. ITA was never adopted nationally, nor required. As Stainthorp explains: “At that time, there was no national curriculum – a headteacher could simply decide to implement it in their school, or a teacher in their class. There was no consistency.”
Whole Language[1] failed so many students, but had significant funding and guru-level support for decades. Brain Gym[2] is regarded as pseudoscience. Even Discovery Learning has had serious detractors.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_language 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_Gym_International
A lot of it is, I would agree, and I think the increase in homeschooling is partly motivated by that belief.
The basic question that needs to be asked: what is education for? What is its intended aim? The answer given will vary depending on the anthropology or vision of the human person that a particular culture has absorbed or that a culture has been organized around, though usually, I don't think this question is explicitly asked. It is a dangerous question, because it makes a person realize that perhaps better aims exist.
So, in capitalistic societies like ours, education has been reduced to what the capitalist class wants it to be, which is the production of cogs for the machine (and secondarily, a method of extracting money for what I take to be a mediocre education). This much is obvious. What do primary schools say college education is for? To get a "good job". The job is the primary focus of education in such a society. Test results are more about funneling workers into industry than helping students attain intellectual maturity and to gain insight into discerning their vocation.
(This is not an endorsement of collectivism, btw. Both hyperindividualism and collectivism are founded on a fantastically wrong vision of the human person; solidarism is by far the best account of the proper norm.)
But this is not the classical view of education whose aim was the formation of the person so that he can be free to be more fully human, of which the ability to known and understand the truth and to reason about life and the world are central. Intellectual formation presupposes moral formation as well (of which parents are taken to be the primary and first educators). This realization has caused an increase of interest in curricula such as classical liberal education which draws from the trivium/quadrivium tradition.
The biggest takeaway here is that we need to start asking fundamental questions questions again. We need to be Socratic again. We need to pay attention to first principles and to reconnect with our traditions to see what they have to say about them. The idea that you can do a better job by throwing inherited tradition overboard and starting from scratch is not only patently arrogant on its face, but has been demonstrated empirically to be disastrous.)
In this case, I cannot understate the importance of asking what it means to be human. Every society, every political order, every culture is guided by some anthropology, however implicit.
A quote for thought:
"Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about." ― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
In the U.S. my mom moved my sister and I into a new public school for what would have been my 4th grade.
What an odd school it was compared to the previous public schools I had been to. For starters, I was not in 4th grade, I was in Community 5 (I assume that Kindergarten was Community 1, so they decided to toss the zero-based system I was used to.) I seem to recall they had combined 5th and 6th grade into something called Suite 67.
The school itself was circular in construction with a sunken library in the center of the circle — the wedge-shaped classes going radially around the library. (If it sounds like Moon Base from Space 1999, I suspect it's because everyone in the 70's were drinking the same Koolaid.)
Classes were "open". While there were enough students to form two or more classes per grade, er, community, our community did not have a single teacher but a few. So you might have one teacher and learn reading, writing, and then later in the day another teacher would step in for science, math.
I believe the two teachers swapped and would teach the other group in Community 5 — the other group getting Math and Science in the early part of the day, English after.
And it was described as "open" and I believe that to mean that the two Community 5 classes had no physical wall between them. I don't remember though And, yeah, I know, sounds like trying to watch one movie at a drive-in while another screen is showing something else. I believe though there was perhaps some theory involving osmosis or some-such.
I remember clearly, now almost fifty years later, at least two of the science experiments we did in Community 5. They involved experiments with a control group, collecting data (one involving the effects of sunlight on bean plant growth, the other on the temperature preferences of isopods). They had definitely nailed that curriculum.
It was also where I was introduced to the Metric System (that Reagan would shitcan some years later).
When, a few years back, I went back to Overland Park, Kansas to try and find the school I was sad to see that it had been torn down and a standard rectilinear building in its place. No memory from the front desk staff about its wild history.
So sad.
If it’s any consolation, the modern Blue Valley school district is still considered excellent [0]. And there are still a few interesting ideas being pursued. The CAPS center [1] had some cool things going on when I graduated in 2018.
[0]: https://www.bluevalleyk12.org/site/default.aspx?PageType=3&M...
[1]: https://bvcaps.yourcapsnetwork.org/
Yeah, we moved around the 'burbs a bit.
Also: another experimental "Free" school in the 1970's for one year was P.A.C.E.R.S. in KCMO, and then a partial year at a Catholic School in KCMO: Saint Francis Xavier, ha ha.
New Zealand has just decided to scrap open plan classrooms: https://www.1news.co.nz/2025/07/16/no-more-open-plan-school-...
I thought they were a 70s thing but must of had a renaissance of the idea
I can't imagine how hard it was for people less bright than Steve. No wonder the scheme trained illiterates.
Secondly, he was one of the most functional human beings I've ever met.
The reason he was so good at herpetology is because he was raised with dangerous reptiles. The backyard of his home in Botany Circuit was crawling with snakes, crocs and goannas. I rarely played at his place, because it un-nerved me. He was very confident and capable, and understood animal behaviour even at 6yo.
I was better at playing with spiders though, no doubt that changed as he grew older.
I'm not sure if this is a valuable teaching tool, but I think it would be conceptually sound as a general replacement for Latin letters for English text. At this point, though, it's impossible to make such a drastic change. It would have global repercussions.
Modern Italian, on the other hand, makes a modicum of sense because it was explicitly constructed during the 19th-century unification of Italy, when somebody had the bright idea that if you wanted to have a nation called "Italy", you should also have a language called "Italian" and it should make a modicum of sense. This is a memo which English has somehow never gotten.
surely there are regional accents of Standard Italian where different people say the same word different ways though, right? Does everyone speak it the same way and save variation for their local dialect?
I live in Germany now but I'm American. The poem "dearest creature in creation" is always a fun party trick. German is difficult but it's a good reminder that English is, too.
If you're a non-native English speaker and you can get this poem even 50% correct you're doing really well. Most Americans (and, I'd imagine, other English native speakers) would also struggle with it.
https://www.learnenglish.de/pronunciation/pronunciationpoem....
English is one of THE WORST languages when it comes to encoding its phonemes in its alphabet.
I am familiar with pretty much every word in that poem. Knowing the word isn't the problem. How these words are correctly PRONOUNCED though, that is the actual issue. And even I got tripped up on some of them.
If I were reforming English spelling, I'd take a much slower, more incremental approach. Make a simple change like SR1[0], that doesn't change that many words. Smaller change; less backlash.
(And even in the worst case, if the reform doesn't take, it's easier for the people who learned it to re-learn "classic English" spelling.)
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SR1