No offense intended to math teachers, but I think in the US that's as much because of ineffective math teachers & textbooks as students.

I realize self-selection bias in that it did work for me, but I went to a decent school and still had both wonderful and terrible math teachers.

Math to me is somewhat of a fractal, and if a teacher or textbook can't effectively answer "Why?" in addition to teaching blind computation then a good outcome is unlikely.