> I've met plenty of people who have a learned helplessness when it comes to, say, math.

That strikes me as an insightful point.

I'd say that the main point of math, considering how little the average person actually uses it beyond the elementary school level, is to teach people to learn and to approach problems in a different way. It has the same value as learning Latin or simple computer programming for a non-specialist.

Also, the learned helplessness applies across society. A time and place filled with the self-employed (mostly farmers) has been replaced with worker bees. For various reasons normal skills sets now lack construction, vehicle repair, clothing fabrication, food production but are big on increasingly arcane theories of software development.

It seems to me that learned helplessness is the largest single change of modern times.