>>11023315That's because math academia is extraordinarily selective and elitist.
Prépas prepare you to the (insane) ENS exam, and only 2-3 prépas send people regularly to the ENS (because some prépas have a special, even more insane programme than the others). At the ENS, you basically learn with the best teachers, in the best atmosphere, and people instantly trust you to know your shit so you get to work with the best once you graduate.
This system is great for the privileged & gifted few who get to Henri IV and then to the ENS (250 openings, 10 000 candidates), but the ENS is basically one of the only places where you do mathematics 'seriously'. Next to someone who graduated from Ulm (the "nickname" of the school), a good mathematician who just went to a regular Uni is nothing and won't be taken seriously by the French academia. Most unis mathematics departement are severely underfunded because "if it's not from the ENS or from Paris-Sud Orsay, then it's worthless".
The system prevails in High School, which a program that (used to be) great for gifted students, but had several shortcomings for people that couldn't catch up. It's not really the teacher's faults, it's just that the general public believed that "if my son can't make a Terminale Générale, he's worthless and will never get a job."
Nowadays Macron solved this problem by making High School complete and utter shit (Mathematics isn't even mandatory anymore. A "scientific", a "literary" or an "economic" paths, the three classic paths of French HS, don't exist.)
On a more positive note, we are trained from a young age to deal with abstractions, proofs, and to not be afraid of maths. Even as a material science major, my math classes were extremely rigorous and I could get an elective to study Complex Analysis with proofs and shit.
Even in physics, we prefer a rigorous and mathematical approach to the experimental and empiricist approach of Anglo-Saxons.
