Great article, and I agree with pretty much every point.

It is, unfortunately, not the whole picture.

Both my pre-teen boys are well grounded in Phonics, but they choose to research on YouTube and Tiktok rather than books.

This leads to less time invested reading, and lower reading ability than previous generations, even if they are properly taught starting in preschool.

I feel video is a slow and inefficient medium compared to long-form reading, but one must invest a lot of free time up front in long-form reading to excel at it, and competition with YouTube makes that unattractive.

Your thoughts?