Math education has become torturously miserable in the US by moving extraordinarily slowly. You have multiple years of working on only slightly more complex equations and concepts and naturally people get sick of it.
You have generations of teachers who barely know math and view it as a punishment, teaching kids and instilling the same views in them.
And then you have outsider still saying "can't we have condense it and simplify it further so we won't have to learn all these useless abstractions" and the curriculum bends further this way. But these actual situation of math is that not understanding what's happening is the thing makes it an empty and unpleasant activity.
Edit: Also, yeah, 90%-99% of math can be accomplished with some math software. It's just for the remaining small percentage of stuff you need some understanding and for a small percentage of that you need lots of understanding. So most of this seems useless but 99% correct is actually not enough in some significant number of technical situations, etc.
You have generations of teachers who barely know math and view it as a punishment, teaching kids and instilling the same views in them.
And then you have outsider still saying "can't we have condense it and simplify it further so we won't have to learn all these useless abstractions" and the curriculum bends further this way. But these actual situation of math is that not understanding what's happening is the thing makes it an empty and unpleasant activity.
Edit: Also, yeah, 90%-99% of math can be accomplished with some math software. It's just for the remaining small percentage of stuff you need some understanding and for a small percentage of that you need lots of understanding. So most of this seems useless but 99% correct is actually not enough in some significant number of technical situations, etc.