Learning to get from A to B isn't exactly rocket science, nor is it an antiquated "art."
Why should someone learn basics? You ask this question seriously?
Why bother teaching someone to make a forced landing or to handle an engine failure? After all, it doesn't happen often.
Why teach someone to check their fuel? After all, the fueler shoudl do that too for them, right?
Why navigate, when there's a magenta line to follow, right?
Why know about weather and meteorology when one won't be entering the clouds, right?
Why learn any flight by reference to instruments if one is only a VFR pilot, right?
Why learn radio procedure when we've been talking since we were babies, right?
Why preflight when the airplane gets inspected every hundred hours anyway, right?
You're really asking why someone should learn to read a chart or map? You don't understand this? This is hard for you to comprehend? You don't understand why one should be required to know how to fly by reference to a chart?
When the GPS calculates speed, time, and distance it does so by the same calculations we make on paper and using an E6B. It does so using a series of basic functions along with GPS data inputs, and these also are derived using the same calculations. You really don't understand why a pilot might need to know such bare-bones simple things as time, distance, and rate? You perhaps can't seem to get your mind wrapped around why the clock is important to understanding fuel management, as well as cross country flying?
I find it incredibly difficult to understand how you could not possibly understand these things, yourself. These are not antiquated concepts; these are the basic precepts of what we do every time we get in the aircraft to go fly. Whether one is an ATP or a private pilot (or both), one absolute must understand these concepts to the point of digestion. These are not hairballs to be coughed up on occasion, but the very bread and butter of how we get in the airplane and fly.
Why teach aerodynamics when one only pull back to go up, push forward to go down, and keep up enough speed to fly, right?
Why understand the mixture, right?
Why understand carburetor heat, right?
Why bother with the aircraft flight manual, right?
From whence does such foolishness hail?