Nonsense

I mean, broadly speaking there's no utility to knowing the planets or their order. There's no reason to know all the organs in the human body or the capital cities of all the states or the names of a hundred different dinosaurs or the events surrounding WW2.

But some of this stuff is just... fun to know. It gives you a knowledge base that lets you have an intelligent conversation with your peers and answers some broad existential questions about the world around you. And some of it is so foundational to your understanding of reality that - if you leave the teaching to the wrong people - you get some very ugly knock-on effects.

The guy who doesn't know what roman numerals are is much easier to sucker into a Facebook conspiracy theory when he starts seeing them show up in a conversation between Sovereign Citizens. Knowing times-tables is helpful for that base-line mental math that keeps you from getting scammed by a shady contractor or embarrassed when you try and calculate a tip at a restaurant. Knowing your planets at least blunts some of the absurd "Iranian Drone Mothership Harasses Innocent East Coast Dipshits" headlines CNN has been spewing.

And ffs, people still write things down. Cursive is a faster way to write than print. The whole reason people keep coming back to eInk and other free-hand computer tools stems from the fact that a pen remains mightier than a keyboard in a host of cases.

These are all still important educational touchstones, even if you're not going back to them every minute of every day.