“They don’t know how to write the word certainly”: why is the level of spelling dropping among schoolchildren?

On the same dictation, students now make twice as many mistakes as thirty-five years ago. Every year at Christmas time, CM2s do the same exercise: in 1987, they made 11 mistakes, compared to 15 on average in 2007, 18 in 2015 and 19 in 2021 by writing the text of about ten lines. Last Wednesday, the Minister of Education spoke of “major difficulties” in learning basic knowledge, stressing that “27% of students do not have the required level in French at the start of 6th grade”. But what do the teachers in the schools responsible for teaching these students think?