I am ashamed to say that I often don't give proper music-teaching as much time as I'd like to at school (6-8 year olds). The peripatetic music-teaching lady (she goes by the glorious title of vocal animateur, if I've spelled it right!) who occasionally visits to advise class teachers and give demonstration lessons, has started my class off with the cat, monkey, cow system for learning to read rhythm, ie cat = crotchet, monkey = pair of quavers and co-ow = a minim.

This works really well, starting with the symbols of a solid circle for cat, 2 vertical lines for monkey and an open circle for cow. I showed the children how similar these symbols are to the crotchet, quavers and minim and they picked it up in no time, writing 4 beats worth of "music" on whiteboards. We combined whiteboards in a row the other day and clapped the new "tunes" we'd created. They loved it. Even the low achievers could do it, with help. And they were very excited when I wore my musically notated socks recently - "You've got cats and cows and monkeys on your socks!"

The children have been introduced to the sol-fa system by means of games with Mr Doh at the bottom of a block of flats (with hand gesture to bottom), Mrs Sol at no.5 (hand gesture to forehead) etc but I'm not very confident at this. She has linked this to a colour-coded scale of C so the children see how the notes perch on the lines or in between. I really ought to return to this as it can now be shown on the big interactive whiteboard but I have to confess I have not found the time to do so - we have so much pressure on us to raise our reading and writing and maths levels, it's been squeezed out.

In answer to the title of this thread, No, but they should be encouraged to learn to read music.

I like the way you describe teaching rhythm and I also don't can not get solfa system. I can not associate notes with gestures. To aquire this skills for me will take as long as normal note learning and not faster. May be it works for some teachers.

I like Don Basilio point. Each performer is different.

MJ, they demand too much from teachers and your priority is teaching them to read and to write.

For children that take individual lessons it is very important to aquire skills of reading music as soon as possible. They need it. Later on they can move to other things, but the basic skills are important.
Our civilization requires one to be able to write and read, and in music education to read music. Later musicians branch to different kind of music depending on their interest.
If one is to have any possibility of professional career one has to know the notes.

I could talk here about the tradition of a people like, for example, the Aka, who sing complex polyphony that is unnotated at both the point of composition and performance (Bruno Nettl goes into some depth about the distinctions between different musical cultures in his seminal volume on Ethnomusicology) but I think that it's clear that what is taking the place of what most universities would claim are 'key skills' [groan] for music degrees are not supra-notational musics but are rather easy (for the students) solutions to the problems of passing exams. As a musical culture, we are primarily geared towards notation. Without notation, much (but not exclusively all) of our music would be unthinkable. We are not the Aka and I don't see a new way of making music on the horizon. We're just kidding ourselves.
Notation is our prison and as soon as we learn the rules, the sooner we can put up a poster of Rita Hayworth.

Not all of 'the left' think that way. However, if it's relatively widely accepted that culture in the Third Reich was inextricably tied into, and complicit with, the wider social and political system, and the same was true in the Soviet Union, why might it not equally be likely of the Western imperialist nations?

I don't really know who you mean by "the left" in this context, but the attitude you mention is pretty mindless, in tarring the whole of "Western culture" with the same imperialist brush. Marx was unstinting in his praise of the benefits to humanity that capitalism brought with it. The fact that they are outweighed by the inequalities and brutalities it also brings with it ought not to diminish those achievements. And could easily be rephrased as "does that mean a culture which possesses enough nuclear weapons to annihilate the human race is neither superior nor inferior to one which produced the Alhambra?" What is either question supposed to prove?