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.
Besides that Reader's Digest ditty you mentioned, I bet more seniors graduated from high school in the 50's than the graduating ratio these last two decades.