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My answer would be: because reading is not a terminal value.
Our methods of measuring outcomes are good insofar as outcomes are trivially measurable. Teaching methodology does virtually nothing to break through the genetics-defined limit for literacy, IQ or SAT or educational attainment. That's not all there is to life. These «creative» teachers have an inkling of the right idea; they're just deluded on account of them being midwitted women endowed with state-approved legitimacy and parental authority knockoff. They self-servingly imagine the dichotomy between rote learning and acquisition of some ineffable property one could call «genuine understanding» (that their gimmicks ostensibly further). You do the same with regard to LLMs, by the way. Still, this property exists.
I agree that abilities are overwhelmingly genetic; a kid who can learn to read, eventually will, and a kid who can't, will acquire a worthless facsimile of the skill. But my hypothesis is, it matters a great deal whether you start reading at 4 or at 9 or at 12. The brain changes meaningfully and deterministically with age; the plasticity and open-endedness available to a child never come back. The scale of possible change shrinks with every month.
If you begin working with information early on, it may not affect your g, or actual neural substrate of intelligence, or your highest achieved diploma (that is, anyway, a matter of dominant socioeconomic practices), or really much of what can be called «specs». But it'll give you time to integrate this information on a deep level, generalize it, crystallize your knowledge to actually know things better and in time become wise before you become obstinate and mired in sunk costs fallacies. In this framework, building a foundation for general-purpose reasoning – which is not the same thing as solving cognitively loaded puzzles in known contexts – is a race against time.
This is why elites are so serious about the maintenance of their private education traditions. It doesn't make them smarter (they are smarter by default), it doesn't make them score higher on SAT or IQ than they otherwise would. It makes them more like elites, in that they fucking understand what's happening and can act accordingly. On the lowest level, this requires beginning to read early in life.
I admit this narrative can be countered with any number of other just-so stories and particularly by the objection to assuming text as privileged modality of information. In my defense, I say that large-enough mixed-modal ML systems robustly improve in other modalities from adding text tokens during training, and indeed pure-language models easily acquire competence in non-text domains, but nothing else – for now – is shown to improve performance on pure text. Well, there's synergy with speech, but humans learn speech naturally anyway.
With the changing rate of generalization ability through life, it stands to reason that loading on text early on is a desirable strategy.
Are graduates of posh private schools learned and knowledgeable? Do they understand what is happening in the world, do they know accurate facts about the world that normies lack?
To ask this question is to answer it.
"Huh? What is Shiite Islam?"
"Someone help me! They never taught me about it in Kinkaid School Phillips Academy and Yale University!"
Maybe the purpose and the secret sauce of expensive private education is making connections with other elites, learning to know people who know people who matter?
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Really? If actually teaching kids to read is not the terminal value of "teaching kids to read" what is?
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