The majority of people who learn mathematics in school (K-12) will only use a very small subset of what they learn. This makes perfect sense; if you’re not a mathematician or engineer, when are you going to use trigonometry or solve systems of equations? We carry our arithmetic skills (and some algebra skills) into the real world, and that’s that.
A large amount of the mathematics learned in schools really just provides a foundation of knowledge for mathematicians and engineers, and is discarded by the average person. We could do away with that portion and teach it to the engineers/mathematicians in college. There are problems with this, related to time spent in school and the interest that people may not show until the more advanced stuff, but they’re not the point of this article.
Despite all this extra math, I think there’s one really important real-life math skill that’s lacking or missing from grade school mathematics: estimation.
