Not in the American school system, at least. AFAICT grade school "math education" is mostly about lodging a particular calculation algorithm implementation into students' heads and making them repeatedly run it, on a variety of test inputs. A large majority of Americans will never do a single bit of mathematics in their lives, cradle to grave.

To be fair, there are lots of efforts to change it. But (being pretty harsh here) a significant number of math teachers really don't have the ability to understand math themselves, let alone teach it.

When you apply that to proofs its awful. To use a gaming analogy the real world is a sandbox game where you can build it any way you want as long as you follow the rules, but in K-12 school, proofs are either for exact memorization, or crazy contrived things on rails that you're only supposed to solve the one correct way.

Sort of a perl "there is more than one way to do it" vs a python "there should only be one way to do it". Nothing inherently wrong with either other than if you and your educational system philosophically disagree, its going to go extremely badly for you.

I don't care about K-12, since I am an unAmerican. But I easily believe you if you say that the subject called `mathematics' in school is horrible. (And has nothing to do with `mathematics' proper.)

V.I. Arnold:

“Proofs are to mathematics what spelling (or even calligraphy) is to poetry. Mathematical works do consist of proofs, just as poems do consist of characters.”

It's true, but telling this to someone who thinks that doing some additions is doing mathematics will not help.

You cn doa prety hrrible job speeling amd stiil grt the piont across

I've always loved the idea that the academic disciplines form a cycle.

Arts -> Social Sciences -> Life Sciences -> Physical Sciences -> Mathematics -> Arts

Mathematics was/is a very creative process for me.

I very much like the related point Paul Lockhart makes in "A Mathematician's Lament"[1]: that mathematics is an art form and ought to be taught like one.

[1]: http://mysite.science.uottawa.ca/mnewman/LockhartsLament.pdf