Sure, but if it's just for pedagogy reasons, there's plenty of things you can do in order to learn about HOFs, the type system, typeclasses, Monoid, Functor, etc. before reading in some input, and if that becomes necessary, a teacher can always provide some template with a disclaimer "don't worry about it, we'll cover that later" - same as they do it for Java that forces you to learn what classes are before you can write a program.

OTOH, the promise of Haskell is that while it takes longer to learn and getting used to, the payoff is that you can get rid of certain classes of bugs. Whether that's true or not is a different matter entirely, but a priori just because something is hard to learn it doesn't mean it's not worth it.