(Australia here.) Maths was my favourite subject in high school mainly because everything else was taught so badly - history (regurgitate names and dates, for some reason mostly Greece, Rome, WWI), science (learnt how to be good at faking experiments! I couldn't believe it), english (memorize and regurgitate teacher's pet theories on set texts). Not to mention art and music which were just atrocious. I absolutely loathed poetry classes until discovering a few years later that I loved it. Maths is just harder to teach badly, I think - less opinion-based.

Actually I did learn something of statistics in physics class - our teacher said "Right!" and "Right-o!" incredibly often, and I & some friends made tables and drew graphs of just how often, and various units and ways to measure when a new record had been achieved.

But most people have a dislike for maths, maybe because it's been mostly answering other peoples' exercise questions. Seems dry and uninteresting, pointless. I'd been programming since I was about 11, so had uses for it all, could test out the new ideas in graphics programs, and had questions of my own to answer. It was something I was always playing around with. (So were music, art, history, science, but that didn't make me like the way they were taught!)