Schools 'drilling' periodic tables into people's heads is a brilliant idea because it is useful to anyone who will do anything related to physics, chemistry, biology and many other areas of science, many areas which are highly useful to society and lead to new inventions, technology, medicine and discoveries. I think it's fine to be interested in phonetics, and the table may be useful to people who go deeply into studying language beyond just for speaking and writing. But it isn't nearly as useful or important to as many people or to society as the periodic table. We don't need as many people studying linguistics as we need chemists and physicists.