Reading seems like one of those areas where being taught is far more efficient than figuring out for ones self, and even being taught is difficult. We could argue about the way in which we teach it, in which case I generally agree that our current model is far to extrinsic. In the particular case of reading, I am not sure how to avoid it, as (with my limited knowledge of neruology) I believe there is a massive advantage to learning the skill early in your brains development, so we would want to learn it before we nessasarily have the reasoning skills to know why we need to spends so much time learning it.