From what I've seen, radicals are not taught in China. Children learn characters from a dictionary and then memorize them. It's pretty much the same system we use, learning the most common characters first.
Young children's books in China are pinyin with the characters above the pinyin.
All students in China use XinHua dictionaries. Look at the pictures below for Chinese learning tools used in China.
Children are writing characters everyday in China, so memorizing them is not really an issue. Although, just a we can forget how to spell English words sometimes, of course Chinese children may forget how to write a character. It's the same.