Have recent generations forgotten correct spelling and grammar?

I do hope that either you mean the English-speaking world, or you're being facetious...

Yes, I meant the English-speaking world. Are you being facetious? Or just extraordinarily literal?

If by "extraordinarily literal" you mean differentiating between "the world" and "the English-speaking world" -- then yes, that.

Okay, you're just being annoying. Gotcha.

AAnnd, to drift off in another tangent-- there are at least two top 40 songs, "there's a kind of hush all over the world tonight" and that really popular Selena song I can't think of the name of, that include the assumption that "the world" is sleeping. They still made a whole buncha money.

Not everyone understands that there's a difference. Since I don't know you (and you don't know me, thanks much), I wanted to clarify.

Slightly out of context here...
My 4 yo is just learning to read and write. And we had a meeting with the teacher, in which it was explained to us, parents, how to teach them to read. Basically, I am meant to repeat the same sentence over and over again, pointing at the words, untill she memorises it. It's taken me slightly aback, I would have thought you're meant to read letter by letter (I agree, it doesn't always make sense in English, sometimes what you write and what you read is a totally different kettle of fish, but we're at the very early stages, 2-4 letters words max).
So what she does now, she reads/writes, she remembers the first couple of letters, but when it comes to the end of the word, she sort of makes it up as she goes along.
We're talking British English here, but I have friends who, instead of annoying themselves with 'definitely', they'll write 'defo', much less of a headache this way.
Could the problem be that they are taught to read this way?

Zana, I learned to read the same way, by my father reading aloud to me every night while moving his finger under the words. The first book I could read was "One Fish, Two Fish" by Dr. Seuss. And I still have it memorized.

Hmmm. "Cat in the Hat". Zana, you'll find there's sort of a tug of war between the phonics people and the word memorizing people. I always taught my kids phonics as an addition to whatever they learned in school. The best way to have kids read and love to read is the family culture. My son had a hard time at age 6-7. My brother had to have a tutor and he now has a Phd in Engineering and an MBA from Stanford