I can understand how an unknown word should be pronounced from what I learned many, many years ago. I love to read and always have. I do not know why they changed the way language was taught since it was so easy to learn how a word should sound. Just like New Math. Whatever happened to that?
It's amazing how well people used to read. Just look at a McGuffy reader for the 8th grade, this would be college level today. Not to mention popular literature, Ben Hur was perhaps the top selling novel of the 19th century. How far we have fallen.
As for math, we never had a problem with that (thank God!) but as you point out if there is a wacky public school experiment (New Math) the schools feel uninhibited in testing them on their captive audience.