Devil's advocate - I personally wonder if having the average person be able to understand math is essential sometimes.
Between smartphones having conversational agents that can do math to things like tax/tipping calculators being in-built into systems, does the "average joe" need algebra.
I'm sure we've all seen the viral math problems that show that even now the "average joe" doesn't understand even PEMDAS - and most of the time these are working functional members of society.
Will it cause problems "upstream" so that colleges/jobs need to include the course training? sure but isn't specialization what careers are about? The existence of computers doesn't mean that everyone needs to know how to "learn to code" as an analogy.
I'm sure we've all seen the viral math problems that show that even now the "average joe" doesn't understand even PEMDAS - and most of the time these are working functional members of society.
Will it cause problems "upstream" so that colleges/jobs need to include the course training? sure but isn't specialization what careers are about? The existence of computers doesn't mean that everyone needs to know how to "learn to code" as an analogy.