Comment by llm_trw

There is math the abstract field and math the concrete example you're working on.

Current education is _extremely_ biased to concrete arithmetic and a bit of algebra. If you have a predisposition to either you will do extremely well. If you don't you won't.

Those have little to do with how math is done by mathematicians.

In short: education needs to catch up to what's happened since the 1920s in maths. Parents are conservative and don't want their kids to learn something they themselves don't understand, so we're stuck with what we have until enough generations pass and 20th century math is absorbed by osmosis into the curriculum.