I've thought since high school that we should have and use a phonetic alphabet. However, it's silly to think that this is directly related to class or that correct spelling amounts to a "shibboleth." This is the sort of idiotic nonsense I've come to expect from some of the modern critics.
(This reminds me of the blather a few years ago about why black students weren't performing at math. See, there's this conspiracy against them. We have numbers like thirteen which makes no sense, but in the chinese system they say one 10 and three! See! that makes all the difference in the world! )
The article assumes that everyone who is a poor speller is necessarily good at spelling phonetically. I doubt very much that this is the case. Spelling is not the major issue - it's vocabulary and thought process.
A while back I read an interview with Edward Braithwaite - the guy who wrote "To Sir, With Love." I can't recall the details, but he was appalled at the poor vocabulary of students he met on campus (at Howard University). The problem isn't that these students couldn't spell, it's that they don't know their own language.
Problems don't get solved by wishful thinking, magical incantations, sloppy scholarship or dumbing things down. There is no guarrantee that any particular problem will ever get solved. But one thing I feel confident in saying is that problems don't get solved by accident. And another is that problems don't get solved until they get defined correctly. In that brief extract, it seems Mr Hall is content to give us a pole and excitedly point us to the side of the pond where we can find the plentiful red herring.
k
