English is a borrower
English took words from Old Norse, French, Latin, Greek and dozens of other languages, and largely kept their spellings. That is why ph says /f/ in photo (Greek), why ballet ends in a silent t (French), and why the same sound can have five spellings depending on where the word came from.
The spellings froze; the sounds did not
The printing press fixed English spelling in place around the 1400s. Pronunciation then carried on changing for centuries. The k in knight and the gh in night were both genuinely pronounced when those spellings were set. They are not mistakes — they are photographs of how the words used to sound.
It is more regular than it feels
Roughly half of English words are entirely regular, and another third are regular apart from one sound. Only a small minority are truly unpredictable. The irregular words feel dominant because they include the most common words in the language — but they are a short list, not a general condition.
Teach the exceptions on purpose
The damage is not done by exceptions. It is done by teaching a rule as absolute and letting a child discover on their own that it fails. A child taught 'two vowels go walking, the first does the talking' will meet bread and said and conclude they are bad at reading.
Introduce the rule breakers deliberately, at the same time as the rule: 'this works most of the time, and here are the four famous words that ignore it.' A child who expects exceptions is not thrown by them.
