I think there's a problem in American english in particular. We call the subject 'math', but I think the british 'maths' is more appropriate. There's multiple different kinds of mathematics. Not just one. The American misnomer makes a lot of people falsely believe that grade-school/high-school math is the 'path' into higher math. It's not.

That's not to dismiss the importance of arithmetic (and this is what I believe we should call grade school math operations): everyone should know how to add, subtract, multiply, divide, etc. But the core of mathematics is logical thinking and reason, not numbers