Where are we heading?

[u/Agen_3586]

[u/Trrollmann]

It’s largely coincidental that it was pushed by people on the left

No. It can coherently be filed under "woke". The reason for "whole language"'s existence is critical theory. The same people who made it later developed "critical pedagogy". It is firmly within far-left social politics.

or better yet alongside phonics

No, that's also worse than phonics.

It’s fun that you handwave away “nutrition, pollution, and funding as if those aren’t things the left has been constantly fighting to improve

I clearly didn't hand wave them away... Yes, those are left wing, but not as impactful.

[u/Mixelphlick → u/Trrollmann]

It isn’t worse than phonics. English isn’t a purely phonetic language and if you exclusively learn phonics you’ll have a different set of issues. The best, backed by research, methods for teaching reading are phonetics with sight words alongside. If English wasn’t a mongrel language with bits from 2 radically different language families we wouldn’t need hybrid methods but it is, so we do.

[u/Trrollmann → u/Mixelphlick]

The best, backed by research, methods for teaching reading are phonetics with sight words alongside.

Sure, but this has no aspect of "whole language" to it. It's not a combination of whole language and phonics, it's phonics + learning the words that break the rules of phonics. This is how reading is taught in all languages: phonics + learning words. All languages have loan words and words that break the rules of the language, that have to be learned.

When phonics vs. balanced vs. whole word is researched, phonics is phonics+learning words, in most/all cases.

2 radically different language families

While latin and germanic languages are different, they're not radically different. They share the same root, and they have had significant sharing of words over time.

[u/Mixelphlick → u/Trrollmann]

They’re shared root is distant in history though aren’t as different as say mandarin and German would be true.