Comment by lelanthran

> I saw some stuff about literacy dropping because they went from teaching to sound out words, to, as I understand it, basically just showing the word and teaching how it's said, hoping kids would naturally pick up the rules.

I've read a lot on this; it's "phonetics" vs "look-see".

For a really depressing read, read "Why Johnny can't read", then the sequel "Why Johnny still can't read", and then look at the dates of those two essays.

We already knew decades ago that some methods never worked in the past, and don't work now, but we still hope that they will work in the future, so we keep them around because there are powerful and mostly invisible (to the parents) interests in keeping these discredited methods around.