If the article is accurate, one Japanese equivalent of this, known as Kumon, is almost its polar opposite -- remembering my own experiences with it as a kid, it

If the article is accurate, one Japanese equivalent of this, known as Kumon, is almost its polar opposite -- remembering my own experiences with it as a kid, it was very much about rote memorisation and doing the same sheet of arithmetic as quickly as possible. One of the exercises Kumon made kids do at the age of 5 is to simply place shuffled magnets with the numbers 1 to 100 in order on a 10x10 board. I can't say that this approach really turned me onto maths: quite the opposite. Past a certain level, the Kumon teachers were essentially just marking from an answer book, without any understanding of the content themselves. They had zero interest (or perhaps ability) in conveying the beauty or applications of maths to the students. The approach that made me love maths was one where I understood the intuition and purpose behind the methods, ideally enough to develop them from the bare minimum myself.