For the child of average intelligence or higher, simply spending time reading aloud while the child looks and listens and eventuate tries to lead is sufficient to teach how to read. It takes hundreds of hours, but it's not rocket surgery.
Kids who grow up in supportive and highly literate households are going to learn to read sooner or later, without needing any excessive focus on drills. There’s nothing inherently wrong with spending some amount of time on phonics, but as a minor addition to lots of conversation and reading aloud, not as the main focus.
If primary schools (some of the most extremely progressive ones partly excepted) replaced most of the time currently spent on regimented reading, spelling, and grammar instruction with the teacher just reading a variety of long, difficult (just within reach of the audience) books aloud, it would do wonders for student language skills.
If the children were carefully separated by ability it might work.
The other way around is much worse. The slower students get frustrated as they fall further and further behind until they feel it's impossible to catch up and give up.
Unfortunately most teachers teach at the level of the more advanced students, not at the level of the slower students. I don't know if they mean to do this, it might be unconscious, but they definitely do it.
I’m talking about e.g. 5–8 year-old students, listening to books that even the best prepared in the class would struggle to read on their own, but even the least prepared have little trouble listening to someone else read.
I feel like we must be talking about different activities here. Children are very engaged listening to a good reader reading a good story. Listening to stories does not cause any substantial proportion of them to “fall further behind” or to “give up”.
> Unfortunately most teachers teach at the level of the more advanced students
This was almost never my own experience as a student in ~17 years of formal education. YMMV.
This is almost universally false. They target the least advanced students and let them more advanced students fend for themselves. In the US it's even more pronounced because of teacher evaluation by test scores, etc. Teachers are incentivized to ignore the smarter kids because their test scores are high already, and they get more bang for their buck by raising the scores of the kids at the bottom of the range.
I disagree about introducing hard books, especially at an early age. Young children will simply ignore things they don't understand, they don't attempt to understand it. If they are inundated with words they don't understand, they will simply move onto another activity. My son started reading at 2, but as his reading improved, it was challenging finding books that weren't too hard for him, with the right word density and vocabulary so that he remained engaged in reading.
Now he's 5 and he's reading at a grade 8 level, and still he will ignore some words but now he's old enough to occasionally ask me what a particular word means.
By “hard books” I mean that school-age students (age 5+) have no trouble listening to real chapter books (say Charlotte’s Web or Matilda) instead of only short rhyming picture books. I’m sure your son could start handle listening to those when he was 3.5, but he’ll still get something out of listening to them at age 6, as will the slowest students in the class.
I don’t mean that we should be dropping Faulkner on a 2nd grade class.