The "if you are lucky and get a good text" is carrying a lot of weight here. My school identified certain young students as having high mathematical aptitude. While other students were learning the basics of addition and multiplication, the advanced students spent hours practicing multiplying nine digit numbers by hand.
The school was then always disappointed by by their performance in mathematics competitions. After all, the other teams were "wasting" their times unimportant reading about algebra, geometry, and combinatorics while our team was "practicing" math with hours of manual long division nightly.
The practice is certainly vital, but it's useless without a good text to guide you. Unless you're lucky and grab a good one on the first go, you'll need to read a few texts to find the good one.
I'd say that reading is as important to learning mathematics as breathing. You'll be a lousy mathematician if you spend all your time focused on your breathing, but you'll be worse one if you skip breathing entirely.
The school was then always disappointed by by their performance in mathematics competitions. After all, the other teams were "wasting" their times unimportant reading about algebra, geometry, and combinatorics while our team was "practicing" math with hours of manual long division nightly.
The practice is certainly vital, but it's useless without a good text to guide you. Unless you're lucky and grab a good one on the first go, you'll need to read a few texts to find the good one.
I'd say that reading is as important to learning mathematics as breathing. You'll be a lousy mathematician if you spend all your time focused on your breathing, but you'll be worse one if you skip breathing entirely.