That was exactly how phonics were tossed in the middle of the last century, resulting in a huge cohort of people no longer being able to read, as scathingly det

That was exactly how phonics were tossed in the middle of the last century, resulting in a huge cohort of people no longer being able to read, as scathingly detailed in the 1955 Why Johnny Can't Read (followed in 1958 with a small item in the Reader's Digest, "Why Johnny Can Read in Joplin", my home town; read that in the early-mid '70s from ones my grandmother saved). From memory, it was justified with a study of students at a University of Chicago associated school, i.e. lots of children of professors, they were obviously in the fairly large cohort that just pick up reading on their own. Those who don't were left to the tender mercies of Dick and Jane and their running dog Spot as Jerry Pournelle likes to put it, his wife used to successfully teach reading to the hardest of hard cases, juveniles in criminal detention.