Nobody asked but …
Have you come to the conclusion that we, the people, are innumerate? If not, how do you account for the fantasy of voting or the illusion of government education? One of the major goals of government schooling is the cultivation and advancement of innumeracy. Another major goal, of course, is illiteracy. Look for distorting of the knowable (history), masking of the process (cloaking of the present, reason), and obsessing over predicting the unpredictable (prognostication).
There are two types of students — those who are convinced that math is not in their skill set, and those who are identified as math gurus but bundled up and exiled to sterile lands of abstraction. The ones who buy the myth of incompetence are then glorified in reverse as being regular folks. The few who are tricked into believing their own competence are shamed into obscurity by anti-intellectualism.
State monopolized schooling, strengthened by so-called standards, is controlling not only actual government schools but private, parochial, unschooling, and home-schooling. The status quo thrives on the myth that the “king is good” to cover the reality that “it is good to be a king.”
I have before ranted about the confusion between product and process. In the case of math schooling, the process has become so convoluted that the product is corrupted. We are producing math innumerates and math nerds because those two products perpetuate the wayward process — and neither can excel at day-to-day, genuine numerical cleverness. The poor math perceiver thinks that quantities are either mysterious or complex. You see this in numerous walks of knowledge. Accountants, for instance, mask the commonsense of their trade with linguistic yadda, so everyone else will see them as experts of their trade. Consequently, commoners do not understand the technical difference between a deficit and a debt.
— Kilgore Forelle