Wow. A personal attack. Never thought I'd see that on the internet. I especially like the guilt by association trick with the government school employee crack. Projecting much? There are better ways to win an argument or engage in intelligent discourse.
Despite that you charged me with lack of knowledge, my only factual point -- that English is an amalgam of Romance, Germanic and Celtic languages (among others) -- is unassailable. Much of it is phonics-based. On the other hand, much of it can only be forced into a phonics-based mold by creating so many rules that it simply isn't worth while. The complexity makes the system worthless at that point and other systems work better. Phonics-only, to the exclusion of everything else, is nothing more than blind, unreasoning faith. Rather than arrogance, I've adopted a position of humility, knowing that I don't have the perfect system that will always deliver 100% reading skill for every child all the time. I'm sorry to say that for arrogance, the irony of your screen name in this context is palpable.
All Western languages are phonics-based. All of them. The fact that English is a Germanic language with various accretions from Norman French, Latin, Spanish, etc. doesn’t matter. The accretions were generally modified to follow the existing sound patterns of English as they existed at the time of the linguistic acquisitions. In some cases, new letter/sound combinations were introduced. Consequently, instead of having, for example, just one “ch” sound, we have three (the common “ch” found in words like “chair”, as well as the “ch” sounds in “charade” (French) and “chiral” (Greek)). The few additional sounds resulting from interactions with other Western languages hardly make learning to read phonetically unsound, impractical, or impossible.
There is a literature that demonstrates that there are relatively few sounds that need to be mastered to cover the vast majority of English (see, e.g. M. Bishop’s “The ABCs and All Their Tricks”). Add a few more letter/sound combinations and you virtually have it all. The fact that the system sometimes involves more than one or two sounds per letter, digraph, or dipthong hardly makes phonics too complicated or hard to learn. All it means is that there are a few more things to be aware of than you would have in Spanish or Italian.
Mandarin, on the other hand, requires an enormous investment in sheer rote memorization to achieve even basic literacy. An excellent memory (in addition to vast amounts of time) is also required to be able to read Mandarin at a literary level. Most people would be surprised to discover how few ideographs the average Chinese knows (1000 characters (words) is all that is needed to understand over 90% of Chinese publications, and even the average university graduate only knows about 6,000 characters).
This shows how difficult it is to learn words using the “whole language” method. Average English speakers, at all levels, have far larger reading vocabularies than the average Chinese (http://iteslj.org/Articles/Cervatiuc-VocabularyAcquisition.html), and this is accomplished with far, far less investment of time.
Young children who have learned to read English and who also speak German, Spanish, and Mandarin can learn to read German and Spanish at the level at which they speak in two to four weeks. Mandarin, on the other hand, takes years and years and years.
Of the major languages in the world, only the Chinese predominantly rely on a writing system that requires “whole language” instruction (Japanese writing is now a jumble of ideographs and phonetic symbols and is trending in a more phonetic direction). But even the Chinese have introduced a phonetic system in the early grades to try to increase literacy. (See post 43). Why? Because whole language instruction produces semi-literacy at best for the average Chinese, and that is inadequate to participate meaningfully in the global economy.
Nobody else uses exclusively ideographic systems because they limit literacy compared to phonetic systems. This is precisely why Korea adopted a phonetic system to replace Chinese ideographs in the 15th or 16th Century.
Teaching English as if it is Mandarin makes no more sense than trying to teach Mandarin phonetically (pre-pinyin, that is).
Many bright children learn to read from being read to without explicit phonics instruction because, like little cryptologists, they figure out the simple code by themselves without even being aware of it, use it, and internalize to automaticity. Those without the requisite gift, however, will never learn to read English well without good phonics instruction. Everyone should bear in mind that in 18th Century America was very poor compared to today, spent far less on education, and employed phonics as the sole method of teaching reading. Yet, America was then the most literate country on earth.
Today, our highly trained education professionals and their apologists have turned much of this country into a semi-literate mob, in no small part on account of pedagogical absurdities such as “whole language”.