This debate has been raging in K-12 education for a century. 

 "Meaning from print" is the foundational sophistry supporting Whole Word, sight-words, and all other non-phonetic ways to read, or to teach reading.

 The big lie here is that you can look at print, not actually be able to read, but somehow get the meaning. (This is what we all do in foreign countries when we stare at a menu in a strange language.)

 I've been watching this debate for years, trying to understand it well enough to explain it, which I try to do in this new American Thinker article: "Is reading about getting meaning from print?"

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/02/is_reading_about_ge...

 This is not only a huge issue but it's hugely subtle. I urge everybody in education to read this article and discuss it with your colleagues. Probably a million teachers would tell you today that the purpose of reading is to get meaning from print. They have been taught this in ed school. They've never been taught any other way to think about the matter. The result is that many teachers are comfortable with using a dysfunctional pedagogy. Some of the buzzwords in this pedagogy are these:  picture clues, pre-reads, context, guessing, skipping, summarizing, prior knowledge, 3-cueing system, and many others.

 And what are all these things? These are the tools that illiterates necessarily use. When you can't read, you guess.

  Real readers rarely guess. Many of the children in public schools guess routinely. That is how you know immediately that they are on the road to functional illiteracy.

 The two biggest changes we need in public schools are that sight-words are not taught, and guessing is never encouraged.