The actual "cargo-culting" in K-12 education is opposing new ways of teaching because it's not how you learned when you were a kid. That's not that far from worshiping cargo boxes because you remember that one time that they had food in them.

As an example of new ways of teaching math, my daughter is in public school kindergarten and they are doing less arithmetic than I did as a kid, but they're already introducing concepts like number sets and bases.