Phonics v. whole language
It’s trolling. 香港 students get taught zilch in phonetic annotation, still have better reading scores than Japan/台湾/South Korea -and this with the characters themselves having only sparse and inconsistent phonetic elements. The better idea would be just to teach children katakana (highly phonetic since 1946) or Hankil (more difficult to learn than often stated, but still vastly more phonetic than English or French) or change writing direction in English to stop the worldwide depressed shoulders pandemic.
One of the biggest problems the world faces today is overinvestment in human capital. Everyone in developed and semideveloped countries in the end knows how to read -but education systems, though they can alleviate it, cannot solve low verbal IQ. As everyone agrees, the only way to turn bad readers into good readers is pure memorization of the spelling and pronunciation of each word encountered -and people get allotted only a limited amount of memory by our level of the matrix of simulations.