>>13309899In the first place you need to know basic arithmetic to be able to manage your own affairs as an adult
For the average person, middle- and high-school level math has has essentially just two purposes: in the first place, math teaches you a kind of deductive argumentation/way of thinking which is good to be familiar with; if two statements can be shown through argumentation to be equivalent, and one is known to be true, then the other is also known to be true. Secondly, it exposes you to something which has largely been stripped the curriculum which is the idea that there are questions to which there is a single correct answer and all others are completely wrong. Even the sciences are often taught more dialectical/explorational way--of course, this no surprise; science is based on competing hypotheses. A consequence of the way most courses are taught now is that it's rare you're told that you did something wrong in school outside of math, and this is apparently so unbearable for modern children that the term "Math Trauma" has started getting thrown around. Thus math instills a kind of procedural rigor and respect for correctness.
For people who are not put off by the harshness of arithmetic and who like the procedural rigor, higher math offers a lot. Math is, as a field, very elegant, but it's extremely rare to see this aspect emphasized (especially by incompetent lower-level math teachers). If you spend time with the subject and see it through to calculus or beyond, the way the pieces click together is very beautiful, and math earns its historical importance. Finally, after a certain point, math becomes almost purely conceptual, and the wrong/right distinction evaporates from the praxis. A mathematician's experience of doing math (to use a cliche) is really quite close to that of an artist. Higher math is largely exploration of ideas and subsequent application.
