I disagree, this is how I learned by myself (no book, no adults) and it was so much fun! The book just makes a system of it: you identify basic shapes to create an envelope then enjoy tracing beautiful lines.
People used to say I have "a gift", that was annoying. So many times I offered to teach anybody (using a similar method as the book) but no one ever accepted. "See? It's not a gift, some people just want to put the hours".
Well, I've put in the hours also- in a past life I studied art and traditional animation (hand-drawn) so I've learned a thing or two about framing. It has its place in a production setting where the emphasis is on finishing a drawing within a deadline, but as a teaching tool to show kids how to draw I'd really question its use.
For me the goal of teaching kids to draw should be to allow them to "unlock" their ability to communicate their experience of the world using form and colour. They should be shown the cave art from Lasceaux and Altamira, and inspired to look for their own internal representation of what their eyes can see and the ways to reproduce it on paper (or whatever medium). Not to follow closely someone else's set of lines.
So what if a kid learns to draw the same pretty butterfly, and only that one pretty buttefly, again and again and again, for ever? What has she achieved?
Here, this is the kind of art that should be taught to kids:
That's a cynical way of putting it. This kind of approach, repeated over many permutations until I have various arrangements of shapes available in muscle memory, makes for good mileage, relative to many other ways that one could practice drawing. It isn't the "only" technique, it just presents one more option.
And it is difficult to get beyond "trace these shapes" and start using abstractions of structure and proportion as a way of seeing. It's the same barrier that happens in gaining technique on a musical instrument: you can pick out some notes at the beginning, but if you want to feel really comfortable and have the fluidity to sight read or improvise, you have to start drilling scales. But once you have those skills available and try to compose, the problem is with having a stagnant reportoire, and then music theory drills gradually become more important.
But most kids do get stuck after learning a few songs.
People used to say I have "a gift", that was annoying. So many times I offered to teach anybody (using a similar method as the book) but no one ever accepted. "See? It's not a gift, some people just want to put the hours".