I'm not an educator or a pundit and won't express any personal opinion on what the purpose of primary math education should be, but as far as I can tell, the pu

I'm not an educator or a pundit and won't express any personal opinion on what the purpose of primary math education should be, but as far as I can tell, the purpose as it stands in both K-12 and college undergraduate education if you're not a math major is not to teach math. It's to teach analytic and computational techniques necessary for research and practice in business, finance, economics, sciences, and engineering. They're not trying to get you to understand what a continuous function is or why it matters. They're trying to teach you just enough about how to compute compound interest that getting an amortization schedule out of a spreadsheet won't be incomprehensible magic. That said, as Temporal said, even this isn't necessarily done well. It's entirely possible that teaching students to derive the techniques from first principles based on actually understanding math might lead to better outcomes. But it would also be quite difficult to do and I'm not sure existing K-12 teachers are even qualified to do it. To Lockhart's credit, he walked the walk and actually taught children at a primary school. How many similarly qualified people are willing to do that?