Too true. I went to a wonderful public school that taught reading by the phonics method, and the entire student body turned into a bunch of ravenous readers before they were six. When each of my children started school I begged and pleaded for our present school system to teach my children with phonics and was contemptuously refused. As a single mother I could not afford to put my kids in some private school that would have taught phonics, nor could I stay home and homeschool them, so I just tried to teach them phonics at night. Unfortunately the school system really sabotaged my efforts, undermining the phonics instruction by making them memorize sight words. The administrators and teachers thought I was nuts because their research showed their method was best. Uh-huh.
Today neither child (mostly grown up now) is an enthusiastic reader. Both have terrible spelling, punctuation, and grammar. They think books are a boring waste of time though they see me reading enthusiastically and though I’ve tried to show them how books extend the things they’re interested in. We have a library with probably over a thousand books in it, but they never pick up a volume.
Please don’t lecture me about what I should have done a dozen years ago. I fought the good fight to the extent an exhausted single mom could fight without any support from the other parents.
I understand :-(