You are absolutely right about the paradox of the establisment demonizing rote memorization and then torturing children with whole word reading instruction.
Having taught hundreds of children to read, including my own using phonics which has a minor amount of memorization, I compare the difference to being asked to memorize the multiplication table (phonics) and being asked to memorize the the products of all numbers regardless of the number of digits instead of teaching the steps to multiplying numbers with more than one digit.
It’s so stupid, it’s hard to believe the educrats have been pulling this off since the 50’s and disabling so many Americans.
I do not believe the system can be reformed, it can only be abandoned.
I tutor my friends kids in math from time to time. A while back one of my friends kids was here from Texas, and needed help in algebra 2. I was told that his main problem was in graphing rational functions (ie (x^2 - 2x + 1) / (x + 4) ) kind of stuff. I hadn’t done that kind of thing since high school, but I thought about it for a few minutes and came up with a plan.
Apparantly the class had been working on this for several weeks, and my first question was, “how did your teacher explain how to do this”. He went into quite an in depth lengthy confusing list of nonsensical steps the teacher had taught, and I immediately understood why it was so confusing for him. I showed him in a very simple manner how to go about it, at which point after a few problems he exclaimed...”Whoa! Really? It’s that easy? You explained this to me in like 30 minutes, where the teacher did nothing but confuse the entire class for 3 weeks?” He did a few more dozen problems with no issues. Then I made up some more and had him do them the next day to make sure it stuck. I then had him when he got home teach some of his buddies so it was sure to stick. He got an A on the test.