The analogy's not quite the same though; it's good to teach spelling, punctuation and grammar, but they're not the end goal. Indeed my Google-fu can't find any reference to a "Year of Spelling", a "Year of Punctuation", a "Year of Grammar" or, indeed, a "Year of Text".
I can, however, easily find links for "Year of Reading", "Year of Writing" and "Year of Literature".
ain't meaningless but take a backseat to phonetics and typography, and contemporary pedagogical practice in language arts emphasizes the act of writing rather than compliance with standards from the Victorian age.
Poiesis does not require standards. Shakespeare is from the age before standardized English and "Poiesis" fails my browser's spell check. It's not just e e cummings and Ginsberg's howlings.
The obsession over standardized spelling in particular is an accident of the English language. There aren't spelling bees in German or French because phonetics is the important point of reference in ordinary human language.
The standards of English language are useful but for matters of taste and social differentiation not communication, e.g. the tenses of "read" which is about as important as a word can get in the context of written communication.
"The standards of English language are useful but for matters of taste and social differentiation not communication"
There are people living in the same country as me, speaking the same language, less than 200 miles away, whom I struggle to understand in conversation. We spell and write the same way, so we can communicate through the written word. If we relied on phonetics to be able to communicate, we wouldn't be able to. Having standards means we can communicate; I suppose what I'm saying is that I just plain think the statement above is wrong, based on my own personal experience.
There aren't spelling bees in France, but there are dictation competitions, graded on spelling, punctuation, and accents [grave, acute, etc]. And the French (at least the Academy) are notoriously sticklers for the purity of the language.
The reason we use WORDS is to do the same thing...
But somehow nobody will ever insist that:
"Likewise, teaching kids which letters to press in Notepad to make a sentence is also a terrible idea, because it's focusing on the characters."
or that teaching spelling, punctuation and grammar are "meaningless".