This was not always the case, I certainly found it hugely annoying at points during my childhood. I remember a teaching assistant trying to help me learn my weekly spelling list, and out of frustration throwing a dictionary onto the floor. I told her English was a stupid language that didn't make any sense, and that all her spelling rules were lies.
She admitted English probably was very silly, and told me I had to learn to read and write using it anyway. I was so angry, I thought that there was obviously a lack of logic to the language, and didn't understand why someone had not fixed English a long time ago.
It wasn't that I didn't want to learn to read or write, far from it. When I was very young I decided that I was going to be like Beatrix Potter when I grew up. I'd write books for children which I'd also illustrate, and I'd live in a cottage in the Lake District. I would have a four poster bed like the one from The Tale of Tom Kitten, and a herb garden like the one in The Tale Jemima Puddle-Duck. I'd set my mum up in a cottage next door so she could pop round for tea and cake, and my dad could live in the shed.
I wasn't interested in what would happen to my brother. I assumed he'd have better things to do than hang about with me, and that he wouldn't be interested in caring for (or abusing) our elderly parents.
But that was what I wanted, to be a writer, and I couldn't do that if I couldn't write. I had to understand the words on the page rather than just seeing incomprehensible squiggles.
Fortunately, my grandmother decided that my frustration wasn't pure disobedience, that it was instead born from a desire to learn. So she decided to teach me, and to explain why some words were not spelt how they sounded, where various words came from, and how some words meanings had changed over time.
I slowly realized that language was not just a tool. Behind every word, whether it was in or out of common usage, there was a history. I liked history because it was an endless collection of overlapping stories and experiences, and it delighted me that when I used words to tell a story of my own that I was invoking those other, older stories, ones that had no authors.
When I was eight, and could finally read by myself, some of the first books I wanted to read where adaptions of works by Chaucer and Shakespeare. My mother was not so sure about this, but decided that I'd quickly loose interest once I saw how they were written. She got The Canterbury Tales from our local library, and was rather concerned to find I mostly understood what was going on, thanks in part to a BBC series retelling the stories with puppets (the adults in my house reasoned, inexplicably, that anything involving cartoons or puppets was suitable for children). I started asking what two of the characters where doing in a pear tree together, and my mother decided at this point it was time for me to go to bed.
The Canterbury Tales disappeared, and was added to The List of Books Not To Be Read Until Adulthood, joining the ranks of my mum's Stephen King novels. I eventually studied 'The Merchants Tale' as part of my A Levels, but the only book by Stephen King I have ever read is still On Writing.
Taking all this into account it's not that surprising that I turned out to be really good at analyzing texts, or that I went on to study English at university. What is surprising is that I managed to do this while still struggling with my spelling, and without understanding how to use basic punctuation or grammar. I had no idea what a noun was, or an adjective, and thought you just used commas every time you took a breath when reading aloud something you'd written.
If I had a choice I would have written using perfect grammar, accept when choosing not to for affect. I wanted to learn how to write well. I think all children should have the right to learn how to read and write in a way that means they understand, and can be understood. I simply fear testing children on these skills will give dyslexic children one more thing to fail at, and will do little to make any child love literature.
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