I invite you to tutor some middle school students then. For values of algebra that include “can be taught to draw the appropriate line given the corresponding equation” there are plenty who can’t understand algebra.
No powers, quadratic equation or differentiation and the like yet, but I can see the QE coming up in next years books (which we recently bought since 3rd grade just finished)
I’m pretty sure that when I was at school, this was a “senior school” (age 11-16) topic, and I was maybe 12 or 13. Kids are learning stuff earlier than they used to, at least it feels that way to me.
I think there is a huge difference between currently being unable to understand something and being unable to understand something indefinitly (e.g. because you have mental deficiency that blocks you from forming the necessary pictures in your mind).
Having thought math to mentally challenged kids, I had only one kid where I would really say he could not learn algebra at that point of his life. Mainly because he had a memory span of 10 minutes and severe developmental issues.
All the other kids where really bad at math, but given the right effort I could really improve things by just working on their stuff for 1 hour a day.
I know many tech guys like to see themselves as some kind of elite that has a secret knowledge very few others can master. But in my eyes that is just a failure of an education system.
A programmer can make a song. A musician can make a program. I'm sure you could train those kids to sing as well. I'm sure you could train those kids to play basketball.
You wouldn't be able to train them enough to make any professional league.
Programming is genetic. Recently I met my birthparents and I discovered the whole family are programmers. I thought I came up with the idea myself I pushed myself through school. No one in my highschool did programming or elemetry school. I thought I determined my own choices.. I was proud of the unique path.. then I met the birthparents and realized how predetermined everything is.
Good educators will always target multiple of those patterns. Bad educators always target the same pattern and will therefore only have auccess with the same kind of person.
I am currently teaching electronics and programming to artists who quite uniformly hated math and physics in school, and it kinda works. You just cannot teach it in the way they would teach it to a STEM student.
That's a very low bar, though. It would mean that 95% (ok, maybe slightly less) of everyone out there would be able to understand chemistry.
At least 5% of the population can’t understand algebra. If you can’t do algebra then you might be able to follow recipes but you can’t do chemistry. Without algebra you can’t do stochiometry and that’s essential for even high school level chemistry.