Understanding stats and geometry is necessary to understand basic concepts about history and system design across many disparate fields of human activity. For example, in computer security, we talk about "reducing the area of the attack surface". There's no surface nor area, but the conceptual analogy remains useful. When you determine the appropriate staffing level for a customer service line where people call in for help, you use a statistical model that leads to the Erlang equation. The work to be done may not involve math at all, but in order for the employees to understand how their company is run, math is essential. When you build a house, you need to do various calculations to come up with an estimate; we do not think of construction as technical work, but if you need X concrete blocks and you can fit C blocks on each of N trucks that take a time T to move between supply and site, you end up with a mathematical model that leads to your final cost estimate.

Denying students educational support in understanding the flexible and general frameworks of mathematics that lead to the organization of human activity sharpens the division of labor and diminishes the possibilities for democratic engagement in the society's mode of production. The anti-math argument therefore appears to support a hierarchical Brave New World social structure because it advocates that we raise children to become functional assets rather than full participants in the economy.