> If every thing is taught as a cookie-cutter process to follow its not surprising that people associate math with blindly following processes.
A hammer and a chisel are tools. You can use them to shave a bit of wood off the door, or you can use them to carve a beautiful sculpture. You can do neither without knowing how to use them.
I agree that too much of maths teaching is "here are 100 quadratics, go solve them" - which is obnoxious and dull. But "blindly following process" (matrix multiplication, change of variables/base, sum to infinity etc) happened throughout my degree and is a component of higher maths as well. Heck, most of the proofs I remember use "tricks" that any mathematician is expected to just know.
I sure as hell don't think children are taught maths well. I remember being taught how to take the derivative of x^2 without the teacher bothering to show where that came from or what it really meant. Heck - children are given the quadratic formula to memorise and basically told "it's magic, learn it" instead of showing them how you can trivially create it by completing the square.
But mathematics does involves a ton of following some process or other to get the problem into a format you can do something with. Probably by following a different process that you've done before. I'm not sold that you can simply eliminate that aspect.