I do private instruction, only- just last week, for the first time a local school music director and talked to me for an extended period of time, so that might change. The ratio of guitar to keyboard students is about 8:1, so there's no good reason to focus most students' attention on standard notation early (from which structure nearly all theory pedagogy derives, historically, let's face it).
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Agreed. I don't make any beginners read music for many months--It increases my failure rate way too much because it's not initially fun.
I remember when I was 7 starting on piano- there wasn't the slightest hint of improvisation in what I was taught, it was all rote, and I can't think of an instance (admittedly, nearly 60 years later I won't remember much clearly) I EVER heard words like "mess around", "have some fun with it", "explore everything about the instrument"...I utterly refuse to avoid this with my students, so I'll challenge them to come up with any random melodic fragment, or a chord, or a rhythm, and spend at least a minute or two exploring it.
That is excellent!