Although I understand that matrix-soup is kind of the entropic endstate of all high school mathematics pedagogy, I think it is a real tragedy: In the UK especially even the best and brightest barely touch any real mathematics until after they leave secondary school so they leave with almost literally no idea of what university mathematics consists of. It's all well and good training people to be engineers, but the universities end up teaching the whole syllabus to them again in about 6 weeks. It's just shit.
The only reason why I am now doing theoretical physics (I was in the dumb group initially and worked my way up largely by myself) is because I read a calculus textbook by accident and got hooked when I was 14. Even when I made it to the top of the pile I still wasn't allowed to do anything more than calculus because the module system means we had to choose as a class whether to do group theory or not.