They looked around overseas, but saw nothing they thought good enough, so they  made up their own - a set of symbols consisting of 11 vowels and 17 consonants that are arranged in syllables which block into words.  In 1933 this was standardised to ten vowels and 14 consonants, making it easier still.  Today the Hangul alphabet is acclaimed as one of the world's great literacy achievements and the most remarkable phonetic alphabet ever produced. 

When Korea was under Japanese occupation, using and maintaining the Hangul writing system instead of Japanese became a major tool of expression of Korean nationalism.  When Korea was liberated from Japan in 1945, Hangul Day was instituted as part of the celebrations, with a national holiday every year.  Today it is no longer a national 
holiday but it is still celebrated. 

Hangul Day is celebrated with a ceremony in which distinguished guests and scholars commemorate the Handle writing system and hold a conference to ways of keeping it as useful as possible.   Essay writing competitions are also organised throughout Korea. 

Hangul illustrates what can be done when a writing system is invented and adopted by decree. There are other examples such as Turkey's adoption of the roman character set to replace arabic. A writing system is just a code, a way of representing speech sounds.  Simple consistent codes are superior to complex inconsistent codes.  The easiest way to achieve universal literacy is to begin with a simple "user friendly" code. 

Celebrating the traditional English writing system is like celebrating a curse.

It is difficult to celebrate the English writing system because it was not invented, refined, or simplified.  There was a more or less consistent representation of old English developed mostly by Latin scribes and clerics.  However, when the way that words were pronounced changed, the scholar's neglected to change the way they were spelled.  Thus around 1400 the English letter-sound correspondences began to deviate from those used in the languages of continental Europe.  Without a consistent way to represent sounds with letters, the English usually negelected to respell foreign loan words. Today, about 85% of English consists of loan words. 

In the l7th Century, an attempt was made to standardize spelling at the word level. No attempt was made to standardize the spelling of sounds. Some units smaller than words, e.g., morphemes, were standardized. Thus [-s] represents a plural form but is usually pronounced as /z/ as in [dogs].  After 1655, educated people could no longer spell "dogs" as "dogz," "said" as "sed," or "goose" as "goos". 

If the English writing system was made as useful as possible, it could also be celebrated.  The downside would be the loss of the "Spelling Bee."  If spelling became as transparent as it is in Hangul, Spanish, and many other languages, no special skill is required to spell correctly.