Interesting - this is how we teach arithmetic to children. There's a certain amount of rote learning to get started (as, despite their amazing ability to learn

Interesting - this is how we teach arithmetic to children. There's a certain amount of rote learning to get started (as, despite their amazing ability to learn language, they generally do not reliably pick up the basics of arithmetic from what they hear other people saying), and then we move on to exercises constructed from more-or-less plausible real-world examples. We certainly do not start with the axioms of number theory.