I have an office job that entails a lot of interaction with people who in the construction industry, small business owners, developers, bankers, etc. I'm too androgynous for my employers to feel comfortable with letting me meet people in person (thank god) so most of it is through email or phone calls. They all vary in education and income; some have PhDs, some never finished high school, some are rich as fuck, some are struggling to get by. Most of them are local but I work with quite a few people from different parts of the country.
There's something that is common between a lot of these people, maybe even the vast majority, is that they cannot do extremely simple tasks or understand simple concepts, even when I try to explain them visually (like I'll share a spreadsheet with them and go through each individual thing I'm doing to show them what I mean). Very few of them get it. I'm not particularly smart or amazing at math or anything, but I'd like to think I can understand simple instructions. Sign this, add these numbers, make this match this. I can't imagine what it's like working in retail if the average person is this dumb.
Huh. That explains a lot. I knew about the "reading wars" debate and similar various math reform controversies and at one point participated in some workshops about how to teach reading (for non-professional reasons), but had no idea this was the context behind all the wacky shit I've seen over the years. Worst part is how obvious it was that a lot of petty politics and snake oil peddling was affecting everything behind the scenes.
As another person who was reading way beyond "grade level" as a kid, I probably got lucky in that my immigrant parents insisted that I learn phonics. I'm not sure they understood the context of all the debates either, but it was probably a no-brainer to them. Both other languages I learned as a kid were definitely introduced with the equivalent of phonics. (To be fair, both were nonalphabetic languages.)