You are right and wrong at the same time. You can teach phonics at home and when they get to school they are forced to learn "Whole Language" which only messes them up worse. Same for writing cursive. My eldest went into school knowing how to write in cursive and then the school forced her to write everything in print format. to this day, it is how she writes almost everything.

We found a lady in Houston who taught remedial lessons for victims of whole language and she found a correlation between it and lazy eye issues among other things. She did a 2 hour presentation to a group of us and I invited the investigative reporter from Channel 5 News. He followed up with a 3 day investigative expose on how bad whole language really was..