False. I’m a professional editor as well as a university teacher, and I deal with spell checkers and grammar checkers all the time. The spell and grammar checkers on the market routinely produce false positives (“errors” that aren’t errors at all) and false negatives (i.e., they miss real errors). I never rely on them. I always proofread the books and articles I’m assigned without using the spell or grammar check functions – which forces me to pay attention and therefore not to miss things – and only at the end run the spell and grammar checkers, in case I missed some little things. I miss very, very few real errors, and those I miss are usually things like “the the”, mistypings of “of” as “or” and the like. And because I don’t trust the software, I catch errors that a lazier editor would never catch, relying wholly on the software. But I can do this only because I have a non-mechanical understanding of language inside of me – as at one point in time, all university graduates and even all high school graduates did. (Understanding of language used to be the core of all education, even scientific education. Darwin wrote better English than most Ph.D.s in science can write today, because of the Classics-based educational system he went through.)
Also, it is not the case that the degeneracy of spelling and grammatical powers came about because people thought they could now rely on spelling and grammar checkers. As someone who has been grading university papers since long before spelling and grammar checkers became common, I can say that student writing ability (of high school graduates, I mean) had been plunging steadily over the decades, and this was due directly to changes in educational policy, which said that it was evil, bad, repressive, fascist etc. to insist on correct spelling and grammar from students. Many school systems abolished the systematic teaching of spelling, which was standard in my day, and in my own local school system, the local administrators actively discouraged the systematic teaching of grammar in English class.
In one extreme case, an English teacher was instructing his class in grammar (as a result of their abominable writing on their latest set of essays), and his Principal walked by the room, heard him teaching formal grammar, and ordered him to stop the lesson immediately, as the systematic teaching of grammar was forbidden by Board policy! The teacher challenged the Principal’s unprofessional impertinence before the Board, and the teacher won, because the actual Board policy was that grammar was not to be taught systematically, but could be taught piecemeal in response to identified errors in student writing – which is what the teacher was doing, before the ideologically motivated Principal blundered in to throw his weight around. Of course, even that Board policy was idiotic: it’s like saying it’s OK for health authorities to issue antibiotics when half the town has bacterial infections, but illegal for health authorities to purify the filthy town water so they don’t contract the infections in the first place! Failing to realize that an ounce of prevention is more efficient than a pound of cure – that’s what happens when an education system is run by people with Ph.D.s in Education Theory, instead of people with common sense.
If you are going to recommend that people rely on machines to substitute for their incompetence in their own native language, why not recommend that people rely on machines to substitute for their incompetence in mathematics, science, etc.? If one day hand-held calculators are able to correct the proofs written up by students for their high school math tests and homework assignments (e.g., prove that cos x / sin x = tan x), are you going to cheer them on when they all get 100 on their tests and homework assignments, even though they don’t all have equal understanding of the mathematical principles, and some of them would fail the assignment without the computer’s help?
Absolute dependency on machines is unhealthy. I have nothing against students using calculators for advanced mathematical work, to save time, but no student should be allowed a calculator in the classroom before high school. They should be capable of doing the arithmetic themselves. Then later, when they use the machine in high school, it’s not to compensate for their arithmetical incompetence, but purely to save time, and that is a legitimate use for a machine. But they should in principle be able to do all calculations with their naked minds, aided by pencil and paper – and know that they are doing them correctly.
My kids, the product of our “great” modern educational system, are stunned that I can instantly calculate the product 3 x 17, or the like. That was normal performance in the schools of my day. They have no idea how I can magically correct their sentences for semi-colons, commas, grammar, etc. They act as if I have some arcane knowledge, instead of basic elementary and early high school training that used to be given in all schools, until the idiot educators of the hippie '60s took over the school system and turned students from competent possessors of useful skills into useless whiners about alleged social injustices and “creative” thinkers who never could create a single worthwhile thing because they hadn’t the mental skills needed for truly creative work. A great creative pencil artist, painter, etc., no matter what novelties he may produce, still learns the rules of perspective taught centuries ago by the great Masters, and subjects like English, math, etc. should not be taught any differently, at the elementary level. Basic training should come first. Creativity and social rebellion can come later, after the students have achieved literacy and numeracy.