But realistically, how many people are going into science fields?
That is what I'm pointing out.
I'm not 100% enlightened on this, but I believe most places around the world start to stream kids at age 16. That is, are they going to University (and for what), Vocational School, or something else.
If their math abilities are not high, then you can only teach to a certain level. What do you do about that?
I'm not saying there is no point in teaching math past the age of 16, but for many people, it should be a matter more of practicality than academics.
Imho it is more important to teach kids how to read and write. Maths is only good to the point of attaining the concept of imagining concepts in your head as well to understand how to draw relations between different things. Everything past that point is not needed, unless you specifically want to go into hard sciences.
Reading and writing skill is much more important, because we live in a society where ability to process information as well as the ability to express and summarize our own experiences are paramount to everything else.
I think you two are expressing similar thought, so I will reply together.
Modern industry is moving upward in technology level, to be more precisely technology has been always moving upward. An advanced grasp of math in the past decade becomes a basic prerequisite for today. 20 years ago, there are lots of positions for worker to simply follow predefined instructions, such as on a production line of car and TV. These jobs only need math education up to 16 years old or lower. But today, more and more such jobs are done by robots controlled by very few people, human works focus more on design the robots. These new works demand at least Bachelor degree in engineering who receives advanced math training in university. These advanced math is a must to have if they are going to translate the robot arms spacial movement to software codes.
The bar for a modern industry is moving higher and higher, it isn't any special to today, but always have been.
The very reason of western country's down fall in competitiveness in industry is the falling desire of moving up their science competence by the whole population. The US had its golden age in the 1940s to 1960s precisely because they have more sci-tech talents, their down-fall is because they got more MBA/Banker/Lawer/Waitor/Salesman today. And math to sci-tech is as the wheat to bread.
For any individual or society, if they can not keep up with the increasing demand (on math) they will (and can choose to) be at the lower end of food-chain. In old Chinese saying, 水涨船高，不进则退.
