The anecdote, which I know firsthand, is strictly true. In the mid-1960s, historian Jordi Nadal, professor of economic history at the University of Barcelona, failed a student because, on the exam, she had written foreign with g. Nowadays, a student in the Faculty of Economics failing an exam due to a spelling mistake would seem exaggerated and might even provoke a minor scandal. The question, naturally, is why? Why can't every university student be required to write correctly? Why do some people argue that spelling rules aren't that important? The answer is that spelling is merely a symptom, a manifestation, of something much deeper and more transcendent: mastery of the language, which includes grammar and vocabulary, and spelling, of course.
I'll give an extreme example because I think it helps explain the argument better. A professor at an American university explained to me that his institution's income increasingly depends on the growing number of Asian students, mostly Chinese, who enroll. (We'll see what happens now with Trump, in his resentful fight against universities.) Well, this professor told me that, given the difficulty many Chinese students have in mastering English, what the university had ended up doing, year after year, was lowering the level of teaching. There is, therefore, a strict correlation between mastery of the language and the level of rigor we can expect from an educational institution. Hence the paramount importance we should give to the way we read and write.
However, it doesn't seem that's the point. The fact is that one day we read in the newspaper that in the university entrance exams (previously we used to call them, for some reason, the "selectividad") spelling mistakes will only be taken into account to reduce points from the grade in language and literature exams; the next day, the Department of Research and University corrected itself and said it was extending this to humanities subjects. The day before, Newscast He gave us a nice report justifying the scandalous absences of a significant number of university students, given that they are bored by the lectures their professors torture them with—instead, I suppose, of taking an interest in their emotional state, which is what should be the case. (Someday someone will have to explain how they have achieved the inexplicable power they have been given.) The "transmission of knowledge" is, in fact, reprehensible. So, can someone explain to me what the students are (sorry, not) going to university to do?
While we ignore that language is the fundamental tool to capture reality (and to change it), we are witnessing a galloping impoverishment of language. But the constant lowering of standards – accompanied by the general acquiescence of parents who tend to overprotect their children – is disguised by the "wooden tongue," as the French say, used by the education system as a whole, a language full of stereotypes that has managed to empty words like "totems" of all meaning.
Many years ago, Renfe started calling users of the public transport network "customers." I suppose that whoever promoted this stupid name change had attended the corresponding marketing courses. Around the same time, public universities began to adopt the same vocabulary, so now students tend to consider themselves more and more like customers, perfectly aware of their rights and little of their responsibilities. A commodification that also affects public libraries, which have often abandoned the educational and prescriptive pretensions with which they were born and have become supermarkets attentive to serving the demands of their customers (the former users) already dismissing, for example, the role of literary classics in favor of new forms of entertainment. Because that's what it's all about: turning us not into critical citizens but into complacent consumers.
It seems, then, that we've adapted that cliché that says "The customer is always right" and turned it into "The students are always right." And, therefore, if they make spelling mistakes, it's because I saw you. It's not so serious. They'll run auto-correct, and we'll all pretend we think they know how to spell. And so we roll on down the slope.
