Another point...

Anyone can get a happy accident. Luck and chance will only take you so far. If you want to get consistantly good photos, you have to know why you got what you did. You should at the very least, be able to understand the relationship between shutter speed and aperture.

Now, take into consideration the project with giving the kids the cameras, as mentioned above. Yes, they did produce some amazing things, but the key question is, Could they reproduce that same photo? Without understanding why you got that result, the chances of getting it again are 50/50.

On the other hand, bog those kids down with all the rules and technical aspects, they probably wouldn't have gotten the results they got, as EMOTION played a bigger part in the project.

Both emotion and technical know how are equally important sometimes, and both could make or break a photo sometimes. Sometimes one is more important than the other, and easily overcomes any shortness on the other side.