Opposition to phonics is political and I'm not sure how it got that way, but it does make the curriculum more resistant to change than most curricula (which are

Opposition to phonics is political and I'm not sure how it got that way, but it does make the curriculum more resistant to change than most curricula (which are already fairly resistant). It's really common for me to encounter adults doing things like reading sentences haltingly, substituting in a completely wrong word with the same first letter now and then, or just giving up on a sentence, and these are just the ones with English as a first language. Test yourself: what did you do when you encountered the words casphetato brolganic alvolamina sooveg in this sentence? A fluent English reader will just read them; I made them plausible and decodable, not like zprxapsi mnoqlkzb which I pulled out of a random number generator and a fluent reader may well do a double take at.