Data point, (or rant) about high school (Abitur) situation in germany: it is the same or worse. I was quite good in math in school, yet in the beginning did no

Data point, (or rant) about high school (Abitur) situation in germany: it is the same or worse. I was quite good in math in school, yet in the beginning did not understand anything math related in university. Which was no surprise, because the math in school for me was basically memorizing algorithms to solve known problems of style X. But not really understanding it. And then in the final years in school, while in theory doing higher math, the main focus shifted on how to use a graphical calculator to do the math for us. But in university I suddenly had to understand what I was doing, to be able to use it. Oh my. So it was just really hard grind, to recover all that I did not learn before (that grind was highly beneficial, though). In theory the universities knew about the problem and they complained about it to us - but as far as I know, nothing has changed since then. So Math will remain a weeding factor for lot's of students, who otherwise might have been great engineers, but maybe had the bad luck, of having bad math teachers on top of the bad curriculum. It is also a really bad sign, that math is so universally hated among students. Because math done right, is just thinking done right - and I think the world might benefit from more of it.