I disagree. knowing words at a glance is a valuable skill. First one learns the sounds letters make, then one learns to put the sounds together to read words. Then one learns to recognize frequently used words on sight so that one is no longer putting sounds together to read the words but is immediately recognizing such high frequency words. This is an important part of reading fluency.
IMHO that is exactly right. A good reader sight reads, and only resorts to phonics when faced with an unusual - or even completely unknown - word. But that does not gainsay the fact that phonics is the edge of the wedge that gets sight words into the brain in the first place.Spell It Out: The Curious, Enthralling, and Extraordinary Story of English Spelling describes the fact that written English was synthesized out of the Roman 24-letter alphabet, with “j" and “w” added. The monks who did it were doing their best to make spellings phonetic. But as linguist John McWhorter argues in Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still (Like, Literally) was inevitable, they never really had a chance. So, English is not uniformly phonetic. But then, Chinese and Japanese use ideographs, and that is, AFAIK, the big bomb of sight-reading. And I guess the Chinese successfully teach Chinese literacy . . .