I don’t think so.
This is fascinating pedagogy. I don’t know enough to understand why it’s helpful.
I suppose it is indeed an atomic fact you need to understand, that “27” means 27. That is, all numbers are metrics for the quantity of “ones”. Hmm.
But it’s not absurd, as the post implies. Indeed, it seems weird to put “7” in the answer box. The question seems to be asking how many ones total, in the object, not how many ones are indicated in the ones’ place.
In the discussion people seemed to dismiss the idea that there is any progress to be made by analyzing the method of teaching, that it would merely be an interminable argument. I see no reason to think that. Pedagogy is a complex and fascinating topic but it definitely can be a scientific, empirical matter. I worked very hard to make pedagogical innovations and won an award for it, and was able to teach courses my colleagues deemed “impossible”.
Certainly lots of Americans don’t in our age brackets don’t understand basic STEM concepts, so something is wrong.
Learning slower isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
As for me, I don’t think I learned math in a conventional curriculum, based on what I hear. In grades 1-3 I learned set theory, modal logic, axioms of arithmetic and formal arithmetic operations concepts, non-base-10 numbers, and a lot of other stuff that later I realized only college students usually consider. I ate it all up. This wasn’t a special “gifted” course (except for the non-base-10), it was a progressive/experimental curriculum taught in a public open school (no walls, 7 grades, 13 classrooms that were distinguished by tiered levels on a hill), entirely self-directed and customized based on testing you did when you wanted. It was really great. We used SRI (Stanford Research Institute) curriculum for language arts. Maybe it was for math too?
I still remember being in second or third grade an getting all excited about “the associative property” and “commutative property” and seeing how there were systems that didn’t obey those rules (I think shown via rotations of geometric figures, where the order of operations got you different results). I realized that numbers were special and there was some mystery to why they worked the way they did. I probably can trace getting a PhD in philosophy back to elementary school.