Mooh wrote:
"Reading dots is important. I encourage everyone to learn reading standard notation, and I insist on it with younger students. [...] Being able to speak and understand the language of music is very important if one wishes to communicate musical ideas effectively [...]"

I think you put this wery well. If I was a teacher (I'm not), I probably would also insist on it. On another internet forum, a couple of mothers asked about buying guitars for their teenage offspring. In both cases I recommended buying a classical guitar, but said offspring only wanted electric ones. If I was a teacher, I might insist on students having a classical guitar, even if they had a steel-string and/or an electric as well.

The music lessons I had (except for singing lessons) emphasized reading music and I was not encouraged _at all_ to play by ear. I don't remember if this was ever explicitly stated, but I believe there was an attitude of "Don't play by ear, it will get you into bad habits!" I'm glad I learned to read music and count and the basics of music, but the methods used were one-sided and I lost interest in music lessons when I was a young teenager.

Even though I can read music well from having had piano lessons and playing the piano, I did find it rather difficult to learn to read on the guitar and I had to make a concentrated effort to learn the upper positions. The problem wasn't the music, which I could read, it was learning where the notes are on the fingerboard. A couple of years ago, I started practicing chord melodies a lot, and that has helped diminish my tendency to dive down to first position at the earliest opportunity.

My biggest problem now is playing too many wrong notes when improvising, and that's something that requires an approach that involves more listening. Through playing more by ear, I've started to be able to figure out chords for songs instead of just melodies. This in turn helps written music to make more sense to me.

I can take or leave modern tablature, but if it helps someone to make good music, great. If music sounds good, it is good. There's no such thing as good music that sounds bad or bad music that sounds good. (Of course, it's arguable what "good" and "bad" mean, and there is a lot of music that I love now that I didn't like on the first hearing, like Mahler.)