The problem is that virtually every grade school math program will teach you rote practice... and then nothing else. Seeing examples and doing exercises is stil

The problem is that virtually every grade school math program will teach you rote practice... and then nothing else. Seeing examples and doing exercises is still key even if you're teaching category theory to graduate math students, but nobody would consider someone who had only mastered that part to understand the subject. The efforts to de-emphasize it seem to be in the hope that it'll magically cause people to learn the higher concepts as long as you use the rest of the time to read passages out of a book about them. They've clearly been unsuccessful.