According to my parents (who were actually alive then), there was a backlash against more traditional educational approaches (particularly anything involving memorization) in the '60s. Education reoriented towards teaching students to be creative and think critically rather than accept received wisdom. Whole language caught on as part of that -- teach kids to _think_ rather than just follow an algorithm. Unfortunately in this case the algorithm is a fundamental necessity needed for higher level work.

Edit: commenter below links to Tom Lehrer's New Math, and yeah the crap they made me do in math class ("write a paragraph reflecting on what you learned about multiplication") is also an instance of this 60s reaction against rigorously and uncritically learning foundational material so you can do meaningful critical thought once you've mastered the basics.

> According to my parents (who were actually alive then), there was a backlash against more traditional educational approaches (particularly anything involving memorization) in the '60s.

Yeah. This was the cognitive revolution after a long period of (excessive, imho) behaviorism.

The pendulum swang too far in the other direction in some cases.

I just read Why Knowledge Matters by E. D Hirsch Jr and in that book he does contend that this sort of thing happened around the 60s in the USA and also prominently analyses France’s adoption of similar practices in around 1980-90 that had the same negative effects on math and literacy.

> the crap they made me do in math class ("write a paragraph reflecting on what you learned about multiplication")

Shockingly, this has come back into style. My brother's high school math classes have been of this type for the past couple of years.

Tom Lehrer's take on this matter:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UIKGV2cTgqA

English is NOT an easy language to "just read". Compared to many other languages, it is very very hard to tell how a word should be pronounced from its spelling owing to the sheer irregularity. Just because you, as an adult who has spent decades reading English, find it easy doesn't make it easy for children.

I believe there are some languages that are not phonetic, you cannot read them by sound out the parts of the word.

Can you name one that does not have a phonetic system as well?

Note that Japanese has kana, and Chinese has pinyin and bopomofo/zhuyin.

Other than that... ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics?

Please let me know if you are aware of more.

I'm not the parent, but the ancient sumerian cuneiform script comes to mind.

Egyptian hieroglyphics did have a set of phonetic glyphs as well as the more complex logographic ones

Yes. Egyptian hieroglyphs have a full set of consonants, so you could write it that way. They just didn't because of historical spelling.

As you said Sumerian could be an example of totally "three step cue" system.

Chinese didn't always have pinyin... and Japanese didn't always have kana (it used to be spelled exclusively with Chinese characters, though some characters were used phonetically, and kana resulted from the simplification of these characters).

at least in classic chinese the pronunciation of the script differed by region. several mutually incomprehensible languages shared identical textforms,as far as i understand it.