[lordnacho]

I suspect schools spend a lot less time on arithmetic than they used to, however.

You used to _actually_ need to do the arithmetic, now you just need to understand when a calculator is not giving you what you expected. (Not that this is being taught either, lol)

You can get to the higher order thinking sooner than if you spent years grinding multiplication tables.

[oytis]

> you just need to understand when a calculator is not giving you what you expected

How do you do that if you can't do arithmetic by hand though? At most, when working with integers, you can count digits to check if the order of magnitude is correct.

[lordnacho]

You can do arithmetic by hand without being fast or accurate. It's still useful to check that calculations are correct, it's just slow for the ancient use of tallying up a bill.