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Your point is well made, but it's amusing that you use "proven phonics methods" as an example of something that's obviously the best way to learn something... Apparently, there's very heated debate on that subject. (News to me, as of a couple months ago.)

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/11/the-rea...

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My wife is a reading instructor. I myself was a licensed teacher in a former life. Phonics is not the totality of reading education, but it's definitely core and dominant. The article you cite speaks to a political controversy, not a pedagogical debate backed by conflicting data.

Point me to the body of research on whole-language or some other approach as the dominant way to teach reading (basic reading to early primary grades, that is) and at least one school district that definitively promotes it as the dominant way, and I'll seriously reconsider that it hasn't been debunked.

I can't point you at research, but I can point you at a child who has learned reading through whole language and who emotionally resists any attempt to "sound out" words. If you spend time with ~5 year olds, I expect you'll met some who have started learning to read before they've joined kindergarten and started learning phonics.

See my post at the current top of this thread. I could not read until I had a teacher who taught me phonetics.

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