Well if you're living at 10842 Meadow road, WTH is that street address in relation to? How many years have to pass before a kid is even allowed to venture far enough out, long enough to discover the actual center of town? I think living amonst the grid, or at least a dense canyon-like network of streets such as in Paris, better conveys the passage of time. In a rural area, you'd be aware of the cardinal directions because it's obvious where the sun rises and sets over open fields. In a city, cardinal directions are learned because on any given street, they are used to tell you where you are in relation to the town center (along with the street address which tells you very specifically). This facilitates the concept of doing errands and tasks. It SAH would have helped my understanding of x and y coordinants in linear Algebra.:-@
Where I grew up, I could never remember how to get to anything because most destinations required a car or school bus. So if I wanted to ride my bike to a specific destination, I'd have to roll back in my head in a linear fashion, the scenery of the road to remember what direction in relation to my house I'd have to start out from to get there. In a city, I could have easily realized: "Oh, that's northeast of here, go this many blocks here, and this many blocks here." And I'd realize there are numerous routes that would get me there in the same time, with no worry of getting lost. A much more dynamic process. The suburb on the other hand was always one-dimensional, back and forth, and linear.
Cardinal directions are essential to the development of objectivity which is crucial for decision making and effective time management. I confess, I remained in a state of subjective idiocy about my surroundings and how to get things done for far too long.

:-x :-$ :-| Then within 8 months of moving to the big city, I got mugged in the ghetto.:-c Alas, I was no longer ignorant of my surroundings. ;-)
Interesting point you make about the obsolescence of our institutionalized industrial system of education.