I'm convinced by this... as long as we make a distinction between mathematics and arithmetic.

I'm grateful now, and was not at the time, to my educator mother for drilling me and drilling me again on addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. She drilled me until we were both so frustrated we couldn't see straight.

Her relentlessness gave me a basic numeracy that set me free to explore conceptual math and actually have fun doing it. She did it for my sibs too. It made us kiddos capable of playing car-trip games like "spot the prime number on the license plate".

She knew there was no magic pedagogy to learning that basic arithmetic, just drilling. Now she was no mathematician herself. Mention the central limit theorem to her and you'd get "huh"? She studied classics in school. But she sure knew how to to teach.