"Our youth now loves luxury, they have bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect for older people, children nowaday are tyrants... they contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers." (http://llama.freegeek.org/~wren/pow/s/socrates.html)

Ah, but there are no simpler languages. Anything simpler, give it a generation and it'll be a real language with all the complexities and irregularities. One generation. Where do you think creoles come from? :)

I'm all for multilingualism and good education, but there's a difference between reverting to "any spelling is acceptable" and rounding off the corners. A difference so many people willfully overlook, imho.