I mean, yes, you're right that many people just parrot whatever they learned in high school even in the case of maths (somehow it's surprisingly easy to get peo

I mean, yes, you're right that many people just parrot whatever they learned in high school even in the case of maths (somehow it's surprisingly easy to get people on Facebook to argue about whether square roots of negative numbers exist). And if I interpret your second paragraph correctly that's more about the fact that deciding which research programs are getting grants is not a very "scientific" (or logical) matter but has a lot to do with how humans behave on a societal level. That's certainly true, although I'm not sure how to solve that. Nobody thought that we'd have any use for number theory for millenia and now cryptography is everywhere. Mathematics still has the unique property that it is, in principle, independently verifiable by anyone, even by a (relatively dumb) computer. The validity of results is rarely in question (Mochizuki notwithstanding), and if there are disagreements, they are mostly philosophical or concern the question of whether or not we should accept certain axioms. But I don't consider the latter a problem - working with different sets of axioms makes mathematics richer, not poorer.