Does the educational system suck at selling math, or is math just inherently disliked?

Well they need to figure that shit out, because the public school system is doing nothing but churning out a bunch of swagaholic retards with huge chunks of my taxes.

I feel like only the few will ever fall in love with math. Almost everyone else will have to be dragged along, and there will never be a perfect system for that. Some ways of teaching math are indeed better, but none will ever make you love it if you don't have a natural inclination to.

Speaking as a person who experenciad the system all the way up to advanced Calculus, I'd say it's a bit of both. Math is well liked by those who like black and white versus all grey, which is why people who typically excel at math tend not to like English classes. For most people, though, they just see no practicality to it. Math can be fun in specific courses like Physics, statistcs or accounting because you know that this is applied mathematics, while in standard classes such as Algebra or Geometry, people hate it because they find no use for this knowledge and the teachers are just too busy teaching concepts. It's not entirely anyone's fault, but if students don't learn how to apply math and teachers don't teach them, then math in general becomes a loved or hated subject.

Relevant article, this is the 'new' common core:
quantamagazine.org/20161005-commoncore-math-ngss-science-education/

Nobody actually does any math in highschool j2kun.svbtle.com/you-never-did-math-in-high-school

In fact, it's better to teach kids an intuitive form of calculus and algebra before arithmetic. Yes, math is built out of layered abstractions, but we can rotate the entire conceptual space to use a different foundation and still get a complete picture in the end.
theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/5-year-olds-can-learn-calculus/284124/

This is why all universities have a Calculus I course, so you get a uniform dumping ground to reteach highschool kids math since they had such a poor exposure to it. "Consider a spherical cow in a vacuum on a frictionless plane"

>Math can be fun in specific courses like Physics, statistcs or accounting

There is no math in accounting, only simple arithmetic.

it is difficult for the majority of the population (something Veeky Forums would do well not to forget), and you don't need to be good at it to do 'alright' in life. so, unsurprisingly, they don't see the point in putting a lot of effort into something they're shit at.

Following your points here, would you say that there are secondary benefits from learning math that could improve someone's abilities in unrelated fields? I am one of those people who always had a tough time with it because I went to a christian private school where science and math were left by the wayside.

Studying is almost always going to be less enjoyable than watching a movie, listening to music, playing video games, chatting on social media, consuming drugs, etc. Trying to sell math on the basis of how "fun" it may be is a lost battle. Gotta impose discipline, it's the only way.

> christian private school where science and math were left by the wayside.

i wonder why ... :o

A musician wakes from a terrible nightmare. In his dream he finds himself in a society where music education has been made mandatory. "We are helping our students become more competitive in an increasingly sound-filled world." Educators, school systems, and the state are put in charge of this vital project. Studies are commissioned, committees are formed, and decisions are made -- all without the advice or participation of a single working musician or composer.
Since musicians are known to set down their ideas in the form of sheet music, these curious black dots and lines must constitute the "language of music." It is imperative that students become fluent in this language if they are to attain any degree of musical competence; indeed, it would be ludicrous to expect a child to sings a song or play an instrument without having a thorough grounding in music notation and theory. Playing and listening to music, let alone composing an original piece, are considered very advanced topics and are generally put off until college, and more often graduate school.
As for the primary and secondary schools, their mission is to train students to use this language -- to jiggle symbols around according to a fixed set of rules: "Music class is where we take out our staff paper, our teacher puts some notes on the board, and we copy them or transpose them into a different key. We have to make sure to get the clefs and key signatures right, and our teacher is very picky about making sure we fill in our quarter-notes completely. One time we had a chromatic scale problem and I did it right, but the teacher gave me no credit because I had the stems pointing the wrong way."

In their wisdom, educators soon realize that even very young children can be given this kind of musical instruction. In fact it is considered quite shameful if one's third-grader hasn't completely memorized his circle of fifths. "I'll have to get my son a music tutor. He simply won't apply himself to his music homework. He says it's boring. He just sits there staring out the window, humming tunes to himself and making up silly songs."
In the higher grades the pressure is really on. After all, the students must be prepared for the standardized tests and college admissions exams. Students must take courses in Scales and Modes, Meter, Harmony, and Counterpoint. "It's a lot for them to learn, but later in college when they finally get to hear all this stuff, they'll really appreciate all the work they did in high school." Of course, not may students actually go on to concentrate in music, so only a few will ever get to hear the sounds that the black dots represent. Nevertheless, it is important that every member of society be able to recognize a modulation or a fugal passage, regardless of the fact that they will never hear one. "To tell you the truth, most students just aren't very good at music. They are bored in class, their skills are terrible, and their homework is barely legible. Most of them couldn't are less about how important music is in today's world; they just want to take the minimum number of music courses and be done with it. I guess there are just music people and non-music people. I had this one kid, though, man was she sensational! Her sheets were impeccable -- every note in the right place, perfect calligraphy, sharps, flats, just beautiful. She's going to make one hell of a musician someday."

Waking up in a cold sweat, the musician realizes, gratefully, that is was all just a crazy dream. "Of course!" he reassures himself, "No society would ever reduce such a beautiful and meaningful art form to something so mindless and trivial; no culture could be so cruel to its children as to deprive them of such a natural, satisfying means of human expression. How absurd!"
Meanwhile, on the other side of town, a painter has just awakened form a similar nightmare...

maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf