When I was in school, the problem was the way it was taught. There was no real explanation of anything or questioning that would lead to learning the fundament

When I was in school, the problem was the way it was taught. There was no real explanation of anything or questioning that would lead to learning the fundamentals until the higher grades, when kids were already expected to understand things that they'd never been taught. They could have taught us about arithmetic, but instead it was "Just stare at this table until your attention wanders off, then daydream until the bell rings and hope by chance some bit of it sticks in your memory." No phonetics or linguistics to explain how things were spelled, instead just "Write this word over and over until your hand cramps, then do the same with the next one." As if by getting enough hand cramps you would magically learn how language works. Just recite "In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue." Never any question into why the Portuguese, with their lead on exploration and colonization, did not end up with a bigger overseas empire than the British. As if that should be obvious as long as you can recite that rhyme and get the date right. If the teachers are around my age, most of them were probably taught the same way, which explains why they wouldn't understand math.