A non-conspiratorial hunch is that the actual success rate of teaching reading wasn't considered good enough (perhaps far short of 100% literacy) and educators

A non-conspiratorial hunch is that the actual success rate of teaching reading wasn't considered good enough (perhaps far short of 100% literacy) and educators went looking for something different that might be better. "Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetency." I've also heard rumors that countries with pictographic languages have higher literacy rates. Yet I'm still as puzzled as you are. I'm not homeschooled pe se, but learned to read at home, as did my mom. In our culture, it was just how things were done. You learned to read when you were ready. My mom taught my brothers and me from reproductions of some schoolbooks from the 18th century, plus stuff from the public library. Later on, my spouse and I taught our kids in the same way. From my standpoint, "phonics" made sense, as it used a built-in feature of the language, and thus didn't really need any kind of formal method. Also, it lent itself to one-on-one with the kids because we were sitting and reading to them anyway. It was easy to stop, point to a word, and ask them to sound it out. My kids went to a public school with a high population of educated parents, and the majority of kids were reading by the start of kindergarten, for many it was their second language.