No one has to suck at math. Any human can learn the majority of skills.
I have way more interest in history and philosophy but the way I figured is I can learn all of that on my own because all you need is to read. Math is actually hard so I better get "trained by someone" at it.
Speaking for myself I have in the last five years or so been learning I have much more of a capacity for making art than I had thought. My art is nothing special, but I am improving every time I practice. But when I was younger I thought that I was just good at STEM-yy things and bad at other things. Relatively speaking I am better at STEM-yy than art-yy things, and I'm probably worse at art-yy things than most other people. But I have huge room for growth and I think I will eventually produce some beautiful watercolors.
As an aside, I've also found that almost everyone thinks they're bad at math? My friends with PhDs don't think they're good at math but they've forgotten more than I know about it. I think I'm bad at math but I can prove a thing or two. My spouse thinks they're bad at math, and they can't do the things I can do. But a few months ago they needed to do some simple algebra at work, and a coworker said, "dang, I wish I was good at math."
Somewhere out there Terence Tao is saying he's alright at math but he has nothing on that Euler fellow.
There was one person, though, that I just could not get anywhere with. Even after several private lessons. Turned out that somehow she convinced herself that she will never get it and never be able to progress. Even if she did get it right one week, the next week was as if that never happened. I found no way across that barrier :(
It is what differentiates stem fields fron liberal arts, in my biased view. You are either talented at maths, physics, chemistry or you just grind, study with thr books snd exercises, until you know enough to pass the exams.
Coming from gymnasium/high schoolit is very different. There the teachers tell you what to do, at uni you have to figure out yourself how you need to study to get the results.
US universities have been known in Europe for being a childs play, if you were any good at all in stem fields
When the kiddo was dealing with common core stuff, I threw up my hands ... the approach made no sense, but sold text books.
Anybody can learn math.
The main point is that the educational environment most people have to deal with: public school in most countries, focused on rote memorization of formulas for passing tests, is the main factor on the incredibly inefficient and adversarial perception of most students and adults.
If you are able to understand something as "basic" as higher order effects in economics and societies, accrued from an understanding of rates of change from calculus, you are of course extremely privileged. On the other hand you are not some gifted unicorn with a special brain, you are just lucky (exceptions exist, but even they have to be somewhat lucky).
[Edit: grammar, ambiguity]
It's cruel to tell students that everyone can learn maths. Neither "everyone" nor "maths" is strictly true, you know it's not true, and most of the students also know it's not true. If you just told them "everyone in the class can improve" then it would be correct and uplifting!
Terrence Tao is a gifted unicorn with a special brain and this makes him lucky, as does his excellent education. Everything is luck when you look at it from enough of a distance.
[0] For example, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11532492/
One speculation I'd be fine to make would be that high IQ could be associated with survival bias, e.g. someone who is already quite adept at identifying patterns might be able to derive meaning from structures without requiring the motivation that compounds over time for others "less gifted". But I am happy to accept it's just a very convenient speculation.
Sure, Terence Tao might be a gifted unicorn with a special brain, he had of course the circumstance and means to have his potential thoroughly leveraged. Maybe someone "gifted" that is forced to memorize the quadratic formula to pass a test gets bored (but not gifted or motivated enough to complete the square on their own).
Edit: I agree with the rigor on "everyone" and "maths" (not everyone, not all maths), I hoped we had shared context on this basic assumption (which I expected to be a frivolous pedantism, I stand corrected nevertheless). I also appreciate the point about cruelty (which, in the schooling context, I believe goes beyond just our specific topic) but this textbox is too small to contain my wonderful argument.
This it total gibberish. No one cares about this sort of academic correction for observed outcomes. "Hmm some kids are continuously scoring better on math exams. Our pedagogy must be wrong! We must teach better." In reality math teachers who are good are extremely rare because people who are good at math tend to not be teachers.
> In reality math teachers who are good are extremely rare because people who are good at math tend to not be teachers.
It's hard to take your argument seriously when your own sentence corroborates what I'm trying to convey.
I'm actually surprised that sentiments like this still exist. We work in technology, we've had enough contact with enough people to know that there is a difference between motivation to learn a hard technical field and the aptitude to actually do that field. "Anybody can learn basic addition" is mostly true. "Anybody can learn linear algebra" is not.
Most people also never had the fortune of having someone describe why resolving quadratic equations is meaningful or how it developed.
An example of a somewhat dense but very approachable topic with good motivation is this book: https://web.osu.cz/~Zusmanovich/teach/books/visual-group-the...
You could say that not every adult, 2 deviations from the IQ median for the sake of rigor (we lose 2.5% of the population under), capable of reading might be able to follow it, and I would accept the argument. At the same time almost every adult was also indoctrinated in such a way they "hate maths", even though their only experience is dealing with numbers, operations and memorizing formulas that might eventually be useful.
I'm not sure this translates well, but the best allegory I could make to illustrate my point is "the fish does not think about the water".