A major reason for the decline in literacy, in schools, is that the traditional phonics-based approach to teaching reading - in which students are taught the sounds of different letters and letter combinations so that the words can be sounded out, allowing unfamiliar words to be read - has been largely replaced by a 'whole language' approach to reading.
In this so called 'wholistic approach' to reading a 'look-say' method is used.
Children are expected to learn whole words through repeated exposure to readers that incorporate the same basic vocabulary. When children come across a word that they have not seen before, they are supposed to guess what it is from the context of the sentence or from pictures in the readers.
In practice this leads to children being turned off reading and literally bored stupid by having to read books containing the same impoverished vocabularly for months or years on end.
The menace of the whole language reading approach is best illustrated by the fact that with two terms of phonetic instruction, a child can read 24,000 words. However, with the 'look-say' method, a child is likely to only have learned a few hundred words by this time, painfully acquired through reading boring readers which have limited vocabularly.
Given this system of reading tuition, high illiteracy rates become inevitable and reading becomes an unattractive activity.
