It's still in the factory model mindset of education though - that's the problem..

Learning math (or anything) should be applicable to a problem you want to solve... Getting an A or a high mark is irrelevant at this point, and certainly in the future.

For example: student wants to create an experiment for a new type of IOT project to help with power consumption: one of the things they will need to get to that goal is subnetting skills to build a network to support the project - binary and subnetting become integral to the project, so they'll remember it forever.