Alienation from Math.

One of the greatest tragedies of education is the fact that there's a big gap in utility and applicability of the math we teach at the ages in which kids are forming their future life plans. That is specifically, roughly between the ages of about 10 and 18, we've gotten past arithmetic and are doing the topics that are really preparations for the useful skills of modern society but not really teaching what is directly useful math yet.

Algebra, geometry, trigonometry, precalculus, intro statistics and intro calculus are all relatively abstract and dry, and though there are definitely real world applications they are few and kind of esoteric. Not something that people will frequently use and won't be able to find some heuristic to get around. Yes you can use trigonometry to figure out if that bookshelf is going to stay up, but you're probably better off just putting a couple more screws in.

Most people are very discouraged about math by this point. Have forgotten most of this more abstract prep material. Will never go on to learn the more advanced techniques in calculus, analysis, statistics and data science that very much rely on what we teach earlier, and our workhorse subjects in the modern world that our technological progress relies on.

I think this problem of alienation from math has gotten so bad that even a lot of professionals in fields that use them have an aversion to the actual math. Instead they use cookbooks that give them algorithms for tackling certain classes of problems without really understanding how they're working. This causes a lot of problems because these techniques get misapplied. Not necessarily deliberately or sloppily, just because without the intuitions of the deep mechanics of the system, it's very easy to pattern match at a superficial level and not realize when the system you're working with has deviated from the assumptions of the mathematical formula you're using.