My first reaction is to agree wit you, but then I thought about it and how do we know they don't? Sure the common wisdom is "teachers suck" and "our education system is out of date" but I haven't been in an elementary school math class in 25 years, let alone a majority of them to really have an informed opinion about this.
If it really is a problem, an obvious solution is to just supply prepared materials that are based on this to the schools, and that will do a lot to make it available, if indeed it does work as well or better than the current materials.
Good point. I wasn't suggesting teachers suck. In my experience, though, this approach is more accessible, but it isn't widely used. I'm not a trained educator, so I'm wondering if there we don't see more of this sort of teaching in the classroom.
If it really is a problem, an obvious solution is to just supply prepared materials that are based on this to the schools, and that will do a lot to make it available, if indeed it does work as well or better than the current materials.