> I learned phonics and became an excellent reader without hesitation. Later, some morons in the education system created "better" reading techniques, f*cking up my younger brothers and sisters.
I, my siblings, and my kids all learned to read using whole words and we are all excellent readers.
Neither your family nor mine are statistically significant samples.
My experience of teaching my kids words before letters was that it was pretty easy.
On the other hand we all learned to read young, and at home, and with the assumption it was a fun thing to do, all of which makes it a very different experience to learning at school in classes.
Your description of learning using whole words is not contradictory to the article - TFA takes issue with cueing and whole language systems, which don’t teach words - they teach kids to guess or skip words.