Just speaking personally: for me, learning the context and history of mathematics would have made a huge difference in my motivation to learn it. I always hate

Just speaking personally: for me, learning the context and history of mathematics would have made a huge difference in my motivation to learn it. I always hated math growing up (despite being very good at it now); I didn't sit down and learn it well until I got serious about learning CS, in my 20s. Our teachers did not contextualize why we were learning this stuff at all. It was more like: here, sit still and spend an hour drawing lines on grids and arbitrarily shuffling X's and Y's. Boring... And for me, it seemed so far removed from the reality of my day-to-day life at that age, that I just couldn't see why learning this "boring" subject was at all relevant. In reality, math is one of the most fascinating subjects anybody could learn. But unless you know why and how it's used--there's no motivation to sit down and plug through tedious exercises about seemingly trivial subject matter. (I would have rather been playing video games. Or climbing a tree. Causing trouble. Or, yes, even reading.) This isn't the only missing link in math education in the US -- but it's one of them.