ECD includes the mechanisms by which children naturally explore the world and grow.
I’m going to give you a spoiler and tell you that children are wired to explore and attempt to reason from birth.
So to fix your analogy, you reading about ECD is like you learning what an engine is before you tell a room full of people about what it does.
Are you claiming that a child who is not exposed to 'reason' will reason as well and one who is? Or a child who is not exposed to 'math' will spontaneously write a proof? Or a child not exposed to English will just start speaking it?
01101100 01100101 01100001 01110010 01101110 may be baked into US and AI in different ways but it is fundamentally the same goal and our results are similarly emergent from the process.