I think our math education do fail in that way. Math essentially is a logic system where you set up premises and derive and make sure everything is consistent. That can be applied to real life such as accounting and physics, or it can be applied to an artificial game -- number theory is such a case. Our education emphasize on the latter part, and it is quite irrelevant to real life, and it is hard. I am in mid-life now and on reflection, fractions, for example, had zero use for my life, and I am in the career of scientific computing. What we need is a concept level of understanding of mathematics -- realizing that the key idea of mathematics is basically consistency. Most importantly, the math required in the real life is not hard -- it is necessarily intuitive. What the education we receive is the technical gaming part of mathematics, e.g. how to actually find the roots of quadratic equation. I don't really remember the formula now, but I now have an intuitive understanding of the quadratic curves and the meaning of roots. And the same goes for quintic equations. It is not hard at all. I roughly sketch out the curve and I immediately have a rough idea of where the roots are. And at work, it is simply an exercise in programming. It is hard following the way in our education, though.
The purpose of education is to show them that knowledge exists, but not the knowledge itself. Knowledge itself is misleading. It is more important to recognize what you don't know than to remember what you know.
To clarify, I personally do not hate math. And I respect the discipline of mathematics. However, doing math (the way our education system assumes) is just like doing music or art, or playing star craft, it is not for everyone.
PS: on further reflection, not only useless, the concept of rational number has been quite damaging in our understanding of the real world.