My wife is a teacher, and has her masters' in Early Childhood Studies. She has this approach, where you blend phonics with "whole language". Personally, as a former high school English teacher, "whole language" is a pile of BS; my wife and I go 'round and 'round about the issue. Make no mistake, the "whole language" approach is heavily promoted in the colleges...its only after a teacher has been in the field a few years that they drop the goofy feel-good whole language methods and put some hardcore phonics back into their curriculum, (I've seen it over and over again.)
It began at the Columbia Teachers College with John Dewey. Believe it or not, Dewey devised the approach in order to prevent children from learning to read. He reasoned that preventing children from learning to read would prevent children from learning independently.
The purpose of education, according to Dewey, was to prepare children to live collectively. Independent thinking could not be tolerated. Children were to be conditioned to accept their assigned role in society.
Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth. In this way the teacher is always the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of heaven.
The idea of compulsory schooling as a means for ushering in the "socialist kingdom" goes all the way back to Fichte in Germany and is outlined in Gatto's book (above).
What thinkers like your charming spouse fail to realize is that you can not START reading with whole language. Just as you cannot START communicating in Morse Code until you "LEARN THE FRIGGIN' CODE."
This is the genius of the Greeks, who broke away from pictographic language codes to popularize a phonic alphabet. You learn the phonic code embedded in the alphabet, and you can SAY any word in any alphabetized language when you SEE it. This is why in 6 (or a lot less) months of patient work, any near-normal 6-year-old can be taught to read with phonics. The brighter ones will read faster and at a higher level than the less gifted. Voila, rocket science.
Five years later, the really bright ones will be reading in this "Whole Language," maybe even "Speed Reading" the process in which the eye is trained to treat a paragraph, or even a page, as a picture, and absorb it. "Whole Language," is nothing less than changing our alphabet into ideographs, which is what you do if you read a whole lot in just one language for 5 or 10 years.
This is why today kids from illiterate homes are not learning to read. It's TOO BLOODY HARD when you skip the first easy step of learning the alphabet and phonic code. Patient, literate grandparents all over the place are sneaking phonics principles into kids' heads. Unfortunately, when these reading kids return to their "Whole Language" classrooms, the teacher takes credit!
This "Whole Language" debate has led to the "Wholesale Dumbing Down" of the whole country. Pick up a 1950 Reader's Digest and compare it to this month's issue. It's the difference between steak and pablum. The Left, who like to keep intellectual achievement to themselves, like it that way.