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I feel like part of the reason is that after a certain rudimentary point, strong math skills are simply not needed to get through daily life unless you are in a specialized career that utilizes the discipline. I know that when I was growing up and in school, at EVERY step of the way I was told by my math instructors that what we were learning was imortant, and that we would use it later in life. Turns out the every instructor, starting with algebra, was either lying or severly misinformed. People need to know how to make change, balance their checkbooks, do a budget, and at their MOST advanced they need to calculate stuff like Net Present Value and interest when making investment decisions.
This nonrequirement that individuals be especially talented at math I think is real, which is unfortunate, because while it's fine for individuals, in the aggregate, you don't want a country full of citizens with weak math skills. The future is won on innovation, and we need to be generating people with strong skills in engineering and the sciences (married with a high level of creativity). But yeah. It's ok to be bad at math because you don't really need to do it any better than you did in middle school IMHO. Nt saying thats a good thing...