I was going to respond to “54% of US adults have a literacy below sixth grade” with this yt video I saw by Jared Henderson: Why everyone stopped reading.
I was going to say that those 54% wasn’t just the non-college educated population of the US getting worse at reading. So I was thinking there was a common cause, which I thought was stopping to teach phonics. I was thinking that this is an example of rational debate, and our current scientific system, not working out. I haven’t researched phonics and whole language/cueing theory, but I think I can remember Peikoff and/or Rand liking phonics. I remember them saying it’s the conceptual view of reading (I think this is in * Teaching Johnny to Think: A Philosophy of Education Based on the Principles of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism*). So I would think there would be good conceptual non-empirical reasons to do phonics. I would also suspect that reading the science they did on phonics vs whole language you should be able to tell which was right, or point at errors in whole language studies, which I think many people did.
So it’s an example of this society being bad at rational non-empirical debate and empirical science. Also it shows us the effects bad irrationality has on people, so some generations of people with no control of the situation are screwed over because of it.