Writing 2.0

Written langauge is one of our most ancient technologies, and I believe it's time for an upgrade. For the last several decades a mysterious fog has surrounded the fairly straightforward process of mastering written language. Loud, bitter debates between practicioners of various systems for training new reader/writers have sprung up and wasted tremendous amounts of time and minds. When you step back from all the arguing and simply look at written language it's a fairly simple system of matching sound to letters. I can hear the rumbling from various camps about that "simplification", but the truth is unavoidable. As a piece of technology, writing is very simple. The difficulties that arise are due to the sentimental accretions we've held on to just because Oxford wrote up a dictionary. It is time to look at our phonetic system and standardize spelling and phonemes. It is time for laugh to become laff, phone/fone, etc.
Children are being confused and overwhelmed at the gateway of education, in order to spare lovers of ancient spellings and those who cannot accept the growing distance between this era and the Elizabethan period. We are wasting precious time on learning ancient phonemes and an unnecessarily confusing phonetic system that is now needed for the greater demands placed on the average mind by our information driven society . I love Shakespeare as much if not more as the next person, but I don't think we should hold our children's progress hostage to his spelling--after all he wasn't overly concerned with consistent spelling himself. We need to simpify written language so that learning to read becomes as easy for children as learning to use a computer or a game system. Written language is just another human technology and we need to give it an upgrade.