You are correct, but it's still astounding. (I edited the parent comment, thanks!)

Is it because many people find it more intellectually gratifying to watch children develop literacy than numeracy? (i.e. Learning to talk makes a child into someone you can interact with and share experience, while learning to count has little immediate impact on how a child can interact with a parent or teacher)

There's lots of math you can teach that isn't basic numbers though!

Symmetries, commutativity, associativity, transitivity, basic algebra/equation solving, some geometry, etc.

Teaching these ideas gives children a language to describe the world they're in and make sense of the ideas and concepts that bombard them - they're perhaps even more useful than numbers in this regard. The problem is that most elementary teachers aren't up to explaining these more advanced math concepts (lots of them have trouble with advanced middle school level math), and instead focus on just basic arithmetic.

This does a huge disservice to our children, because kids soak these topics up when well explained, and seem to really enjoy the learning (which is often hands on). I spent a fair bit of time in university (where I studied math) volunteering along with a professor to teach lectures to young children (1st-4th grade in the US) about math.

I honestly wish we could just accept that mathematics is as much of a specialized language/topic as foreign languages, and get specialist teachers starting early on.

> There's lots of math you can teach that isn't basic numbers though!

> Symmetries, commutativity, associativity, transitivity, basic algebra/equation solving, some geometry, etc.

And games. Even rock, scissors, paper (plus variants).

Especially imbalanced variants. (Let the kids figure out the imbalances.)

Our son was in a cooperative preschool for a while, so I got to see it in action a number of times. They weren't teaching literacy either. The main focus of the classes were developing the skills you need to be able to function in kindergarten -- things like doing what the teacher tells you, raising your hand, being quiet, playing nicely with the other kids, etc. There was basic learning of the alphabet and numbers. Generalized world knowledge. And lots of play time.

That said, my impression would certainly be that the numbers and/or patterns work (which I would consider low-level fundamental math stuff) amounted to more than one minute a day.