The 1960s schools experiment that created a whole new alphabet

I'm not a native English speaker, I don't have any experience with this ITA crap, nor any emotional investment on it. However I studied enough Linguistics to smell the bullshit from a distance.

I'm sceptic on claims that ITA hindered or helped those people to learn English. It looks like fluff; not specially helpful, but not specially harmful either. At most you could claim it wasted time that could be better spent teaching something else, but that's it.

The hardest part to teach someone to read in an alphabet is not to teach them the value of the letters, but rather the idea behind the alphabet - that those lines in a paper are related to some abstract segments of their speech. And that "idea" is trivial to transpose, if you need to relearn the former; for example, if you're learning a second alphabetic script.

Now look at the personal anecdotes being shared. I'll emphasise some parts:

And then, at A-level, I’ll never forget my English teacher said to me, ‘You’ll never get an A because of your spelling.’ That was crushing. English was the one subject I loved – I felt so aggrieved.”

I know plenty people around her age who can't spell Portuguese for shit. As in, "eçeção" tier. Even with a more transparent spelling system, and no Initial Teaching Alphabet. But just like her, they had shitty teachers really, really eager to put students down.

For Alder, the abrupt transition from ITA to the standard alphabet felt like a betrayal. “It was like they said: ‘Right, we’ve told you a pack of lies for the past two years, now this is how you’re actually meant to read and write.’ My disgust at being lied to, that loss of trust, that stuck with me. I was never interested in English after that.”

"We're going to teach you this, but you'll never be told why."

Is the issue really ITA? Or primitive didactic methods of those times, that treated students as stupid little things instead of rational human beings? I'm betting the later.