People need good teachers at all ages. I'm glad his college professors helped him out enough to lead him to major in math.
On my side I was good at math but crashed in college, so much I avoided it, it's the reason I went into programming. Until 2 or 3 years ago I clicked again, I started to see through abstract math and now I'm back to math/phys because it's beautiful again.
If your buddy finds pleasure and can walk the path I'm not surprised he's still walking :)
Professional athletes are highly competitive. People don't hire basketball players to throw balls into hoops; they hire them to beat other basketball players. Unless you are one of the best humans at basketball, you are worthless as a basketball player.
In almost any profession, you do not need to be the best to have value.
If you knew it's not what they meant then why did you start off saying that's what they meant? If you thought they were missing the point why didn't you just say that?
Yeah, I know that's not what you mean, but you're missing a point. The premise of the article is that US has a STEM problem. I merely suggested that they're allocating resources wrong to fix it. I didn't mean they should introduce rigor and discipline or increase hours - I said that the best way to achieve results in teaching math is to fix it early, when it's most commonly broken (in my experience).
It actually helps you if you decide to switch interests, because you got the basics right, which in this case is the ability to think in an abstract way.
If you don't agree with me, you should have provided arguments that math problems do not arise early in education system, but they are introduced later.
One last thought - timing _does_ matter. That's why almost every professional athlete starts as a child. The question is how much you gain for starting early and I agree, that it is usually unreasonable to put too much pressure on kids. Pressure is not necessary to fix the system as far as I see it, though.