Does the slaughter in the mastery of French that all the chronicles on the subject deplore have equivalents in other languages? It would be very interesting to search English, Spanish, Italian newspapers, as well as teacher training colleges in these languages, for example, to see if their students have the same problems as ours. And if not, why? Do students in their primary and secondary schools read more books, are the methodologies different, do the students do more or less dictation, do they memorize more grammar rules, do they have more personalized help? I would bet that their situation is less catastrophic than ours. If their learners probably have as many problems with construction of sentences, vocabulary, punctuation, style, I very much doubt that they make as many spelling mistakes as young (and not so young) French speakers. And as these faults explain a good part of the failures in the official examinations, they are the ones which should proportionally retain the attention they deserve in the corrective measures to be taken.
However, if all the chronicles that I have read blame who better on the lower levels (in the case of CEGEPs), on new pedagogies, the lack of interest in reading, social media, etc. , none mention the fact that French spelling ranks among the most difficult in the world. Italians and Spaniards (and Portuguese, and Germans…) have recently considerably simplified their spelling. And English may be as complex as French when it comes to its lexical spelling (in words like thought, tough, through, truefor example), its grammatical spelling, the source of so many errors in French, is infinitely simpler: it does not include any agreement of adjectives or of the past participle and it contains a much smaller number of grammatical suffixes, which are pronounced there moreover, always, contrary to a large number of French grammatical suffixes—for example in “I take(s)”, “tu va(s)”, “ils chant(ent)”.
It is high time to thoroughly review this archaic spelling, full of traps and rules as complex as they are useless, and to stop passing the buck about what, and above all who, to blame for this disaster.