Comment by cyphar

I am aware of that (the articles I linked even mention it), my point was that modern fears around literacy are based on data suggesting that child literacy rates have recently declined.

If lack of phonics was solely to blame then almost all US adults alive today (not just "a generation" -- anyone born between the 1920s and 2000s, at least) would have literacy problems, but the concern is that today's children have literacy problems in contrast to previous generations -- the exact opposite of what you would expect. To be fair, people in the 1950s were also claiming that children were illiterate compared to previous generations, but I'm not sure whether those claims are really credible. Do your parents' and grandparents' generations strike you as being shockingly illiterate?