I used to be a teacher in a school system that emphasized against rote learning, knowledge memorization, and numerical calculations (for physics). Well, we did

I used to be a teacher in a school system that emphasized against rote learning, knowledge memorization, and numerical calculations (for physics). Well, we did do that stuff but it could only get the student a grade D or E. The massive problem was that even the teachers didn't understand what the mysterious higher level skills we were supposed to be teaching were or how to teach or assess them. The students had no hope of fair treatment. The official assessment criteria were wholistic and wordy. Numerical grades were forbidden, as was averaging scores from multiple assessments into the final, so teachers made up some grades based on feelings, or secretly used a spreadsheet that added a little random factor to make it look non-formulaic. Anyway, point is, some modern education removes the old low-level skills (mainly memorization) but doesn't replace it with anything nor even keep the useful parts of it (eg. mental arithmetic).