This is a fantastic comment. I think your analysis at the end is spot-on. It's like the K-12 math curriculum is a hazing ritual for a vast fraternity of "smart people". Without this ritual, their group identity is called into question.
Reading? Now I have access to all these stories! And it's plainly useful in every single other class, pretty much constantly (even math class—go figure, this math book has more words than numbers in it!). I can read subtitles (on anime, say—it's gone pretty mainstream now, for kids). I can read video games without voice acting, and follow them (Breath of the Wild requires lots of reading, for instance). It is constantly, obviously useful, and enables access to lots of things that most kids want to do.
History? Social studies? Largely an application of reading—and hey, look, more stories! Great! Oh and now I understand that movie I watched better, or that game I'm playing.
Science? Well look at that, a ton more reading, and when it's taught halfway right it's like working through a mystery story, even. Fun!
Math? It really seems like you're just doing it for its own sake, and... that's it. The actual facts or what's intended don't matter—that is what it feels like. It's occasionally useful in other classes, but not constantly like reading is, and often that math is pretty simple compared to the stuff you're learning in math class. Kids aren't dumb and recognize quickly that word problems are contrived, pandering, and ridiculous, and meanwhile have a hard time finding applications for any of this even if they go looking for it. Their parents? They probably see them rely on reading (even just signs or directions) 1000x more often than they see them apply math beyond what's taught by 6th grade. Reading? Useful daily. Math? Only occasionally, and it's mostly the simple stuff.
To a student, it feels like math is about as useful as learning some constructed language that everyone's telling them is super important but in their actual experience sure doesn't seem to be—I mean, no adults they know even read, write, or speak it, and they seem to be getting by just fine. It feels like you're being gaslit or having some kind of practical joke played on you. Of course it's hard to care about it, unless you're the sort who just loves mathematical puzzles, like the way some people are really into crossword puzzles, but most people aren't.
I don't have any kind of solution to this, but IMO it's the fundamental problem with math education.
Reading? Yes, the intricacies of clause structure? No, no one uses that besides a few people.
Science? Almost no one I know uses chemistry or biology. I don’t even remember how to balance a chemical equation.
The same arguments against mathematics education can be used for almost anything.
If “Reading” is the example for English education, then “addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division” are the analogs in math, and they’re used by pretty much everyone in day to day life and in other classes. Hell, they’re even used when reading.
The next 6 years? Not so much. Meanwhile, at least the english classes have stories in them, and the kids might not hate all of them.
> Reading? Yes, the intricacies of clause structure? No, no one uses that besides a few people.
Formal grammar is barely taught at all, now. For better or worse. Drilling spelling words has also fallen out of favor.
> The same arguments against mathematics education can be used for almost anything.
They really can't, nowhere near the same degree. If we ignore that and assume more than a tiny minority of kids will give a shit about math if we just present it to them harder or more mathily, then it's not gonna get better.
Do you ever play board games and try to come up with the best strategy? That's math.
And that's not even getting into things that involve numbers…
> Do you ever play board games and try to come up with the best strategy? That's math.
If zero people who aren't math majors think that's true—which is the case—then our 13 years of compulsory math education is to blame for that.
If people manage to do both well enough to get by just fine in life, without any formal math education on it, then one wonders how necessary math education is to effectively do the math that people actually do.
(personally, I'd look in the philosophy section for the former, at least, seeing as all my logic books, except the one specifically about mathematical proofs, are philosophy textbooks, including the ones full of symbols)
You must not know many people. The problem with trying to categorize K-12 mathematics (or other common, but non-uniform experiences) as good or bad or somewhere in between is precisely that the experience is non-uniform. Even being in the same classes as my twin sister (though sometimes not), we formed some wildly different opinions on different teachers and classes and even classmates. The experience was too different even sitting 5' from each other, let alone when speaking about this with people who attended schools in different parts of the country, or even different parts of the same state or city.