Except this video and the study it references are bullshit.
You're telling me that some kids never learned that C-A-R spells car?
Yes, that is exactly what we are telling you, and this video and and the studies it references line up with my own experience.
My mom started me on reading before preschool, and even as early as the late 80s/early 90s, you would catch shit for that from schools. Luckily, my mom values education more than educators, and would raise holy hell on the occasions when I'd get in actual trouble for being above the curve.
Your experience echoes my own.
Phonics was on the way out as far back as the late 80s and early 90s. My mother worked in education and
hated this. She made sure my sisters and I were learning phonics at preschool and kindergarten age. In elementary school, my earlier teachers were still trying to teach phonics, but it kept getting watered down. They were forced into retirement for trying to teach phonics instead of the New Ways. I did not understand at the time why my mother ranted about the teacher's union being corrupt. I do now.
At the same time, as phonics was being forced out, adults kept getting more and more worried about declining reading scores. All manner of programs and incentives were tried to get kids reading more: Scholastic Book Club, points towards free pizza, and so on. Every kid needed to know how to read.
Elementary school and middle school were a frustrating time. I got in trouble for trying to read books above my grade level just as often as I was praised for reading so well and so voraciously.
By the time I got to high school, teachers and parents were rightly concerned about kids entering high school barely reading at middle school level. Remedial measures had escalated to school-wide daily mandatory reading time, a list of books approved for reading time, and periodic testing. In my case, the teachers and admins were utterly baffled and had no idea what to do with a young faggot who was already reading at college level per their tests. They ultimately decided to leave me alone and let me read whatever I wanted, much to my relief.
Some years back, I had a side gig doing remedial tutoring for a short while. I have seen the damage of the current methods first-hand. When I was in middle school, I was reading things like
The Chronicles of Prydain, The Chronicles of Narnia, Rifles for Waite, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, and
A Wrinkle in Time. Now, 5th graders struggle to read, I shit you not,
Jumanji, or
Where the Wild Things Are. Kids now, when they hit a word they don't know, just skip over it. Sometimes they just halt entirely. The idea that the individual letters, or certain combinations thereof, represent specific sounds is alien to them. If I asked them to try to sound out the word, or reached for a dictionary, they'd get upset and ask me to just tell them what it meant and how to say it.
The current pedagogy around reading and writing is trash. English uses a phonetic writing system. Someone lacking an understanding of those phonetic fundamentals is doomed to failure.
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