In many public schools, "oh you'll have a calculator for that!" is the common response. You don't need to memorize them, so many kids won't. But if you want to be good at foiling later on, you need to know them in your head automatically. Refusing to require some degree of memorization is setting kids up for flunking out of math later, and most tickets out of poverty these days require a college degree with heavy math coursework.
I never memorized the tables, I either had a calculator, or on the SAT and GRE or other times I don't have a calculator and need to multiply, I just draw dots and then count them up.