[asveikau]

My experience with math education in the US is that they approach it as unapproachable. It is supposed to be some sort of magic, that only limited practitioners may understand, and even then only after an incredibly slow introduction. People teaching it are usually unqualified. Then if you're like me, when you get to college you get exposed to a lot better, then you wonder what those k-12 people were thinking. But a lot of people don't make it that far, because their earlier experience makes them think math is uninteresting or they'll never be any good at it.

Note that my experience involved going to a supposedly "good" school district. There is the entirely unrelated problem of schools varying in quality based on where you live.