“To a small enough child, reading is a "useless fact." After all, an illiterate child has gone his whole life without needing to know how to read”
“Why waste time learning letters...”
This is the point/philosophy of it. The child will choose to learn when they need and want to. Having spoken to some of these children I found most taught themselves to read without formal instruction.
“None of the facts they teach in school are truly useless, but rather the person who judges them useless is just too ignorant to know their value.”
Exactly. So if they are useless to the person it means an EXTERNAL party has made a judgement call on what knowledge is useful. It comes down to who decides what Is useful knowledge and what is not. Who should make threat decision?