It's a good little lesson about "ideals" or something too, eventually. It's fun when you get to joke with your kids about how strange the spelling of some words are.

I just watched Megamind for the first time with my two kids yesterday, and some of the humor is based on Megamind constantly mispronouncing words ("school" becomes "shool", "Metro City" is pronounced as one word, like "atrocity", etc). My older son thought that was funny, my younger son didn't get it.

That's a really good point, and also a good lesson for adults thinking about education.

Oftentimes it's actually a pretty bad idea to teach something based on the "ideal" understanding of someone who's already mastered the subject. Teaching a somewhat useful but ultimately faulty method as a stepping stone to mastery is often much better. That can be difficult, though because someone who understands those faults often gets hung up on them, and can't avoid the temptation to reject the stepping stone, in favor of pushing for the learner to take a too-big leap to the "true" understanding.

"Well, you see, the universe can be thought of as a quantum foam..."

Without going phonics thereafter I would probably have ended up as completely illiterate before middle school.