The Education Establishment lie when they say learning basic facts is not important and multiplication tables are not useful or necessary. K-12 education these days is a relentless war on facts and memorization. (Children, we are told, don’t need to know history as long as they can think historically. This sort of drivel started in the 1950s: “We don’t teach history; we teach children.”)
How one can think ‘historically’ without knowing history is something of a puzzle.
Source: K-12: Patterns of Deception
