You learn to walk before you learn to run.
This should be obvious, but a surprisingly large number of people don't get it. They don't see "running" as the logical next step after "walking", but rather as an alternative to it. "Why are you teaching my child to walk, when you could teach him/her to run instead?"
They imagine that the fastest way to get to the advanced lessons is to skip the beginner lessons. Yeah, it's a good way to get fast to the Lesson 1 in the Advanced textbook... and to remain stuck there forever, because you don't know the prerequisites.
The article describes what happens when the people who don't get it are setting the rules for others to follow.
Someone noticed that the advanced readers read fast (correct), sometimes entire sentences at once (kinda correct), and concluded that the proper way to teach children is to insist that they do it from the start (utterly insanely wrong). You should increase your reading speed naturally, as you get lots and lots of practice; not because you skip letters - that's actually when we should tell the kids to slow down and read it again.
Or maybe, listen out, not everyone is stupid and the reality is just really complicated?
As an anecdote, my daughter was learning reading in her native language in school starting with letters, then syllables and had a very hard time moving past that with a lot of support from teachers and family.
She started learning to read in English almost 5 years later by reading the whole words from the start and outperformed her reading and comprehension speed to her native language very quickly.
There are huge number of variables in play and common sense frequently doesn't work.
Don't know why this has to constantly be mentioned, but people who read this website, and their children, are not representative of the general population.
It is well known that some kids will learn to read no matter how they are taught. Most kids will not.
A small portion of people are different, but we should start with the simple way first.
And while context can get one ahead early, you don’t want to be like the adult who couldn’t actually read.
Yeah, people are different. I guess there may be some kids for whom the slow reading does not work for some reason, and who benefit from reading the whole words. But in my experience, most kids start making mistakes when they try to read too fast.
Perhaps the method was helpful to some children, and the mistake was to prescribe it to everyone.