[jfengel]

That sounds great to me. The existing definition of "math" sucks.

Practically all of the math that I use on a daily basis I got before 6th grade. Everything after that was tracked towards a calculus that I don't use even as a software developer. At best it was a kind of sideways lesson in how to reason, such as geometric proofs. But I could have been taught the same lessons more pragmatically in the context of, say, interpreting statistics or basic accounting. (Debugging a general ledger error is a great exercise in reasoning, using nothing more than addition and subtraction.)

Math is about language and culture. The most important math lessons should be "How do you formulate this real-world question as a math problem?" The quality of word problems that I got in school were godawful. And to judge from the homework I saw copypasted into Quora, they haven't gotten better. (I hated watching students copypaste their homework but I hated the questions even more. They were practically begging students to think of math as a pointless exercise.)

As for social justice -- well, I'd like to think that social justice is something we can all agree to be in favor of. And math is a tool for helping figure out what social justice is. That doesn't mean we'll all agree on it, but most Internet discussions of it that I've seen appear to be less about legitimate disagreements and more about how to lie with math. I'd love to see students taught how cherry-picking works and how to build good models. We won't still agree, but at least we'll know what the legitimate differences are -- and then commence the hard but genuine problem of finding accommodations for each other.