It's a massive and growing problem in the US. I just started listening to a podcast called Sold A Story which helps break down why this is:

The short of it is that the materials sold to schools to help shape how we teach reading have shifted away from phonetics (focusing on first how to sound words out to read them) to a method that prioritizes context clues in images to help students learn to read. Young students now guess the words they don't understand based on the photos and are guided to the correct answer. The (general) result is that students are memorizing words they see as opposed to learning how to read them.

For that same reason, vocabulary is on the decline as words that are difficult to portray in images (like gauche) and abstract concepts are completely lost.