It would be interesting to understand how "school mathematics" displaced "actual mathematics" in our educational system. I suspect that part of explanation has

It would be interesting to understand how "school mathematics" displaced "actual mathematics" in our educational system. I suspect that part of explanation has to do with computers. The word "computer" was originally a job title (see, for example the Harvard Computers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Computers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Computers). It changed meaning in the middle of the twentieth century when mechanical (and later electronic) computers displaced human computers. It seems like much of "school mathematics" is vocational training to work as a computer. Unfortunately, we don't employ people to do computation anymore because the cheapest and worst computer you can but will be thousands of times more productive at computation than a human being. If our mathematics curriculum was designed to train people to be computers, and that profession no longer exists, it's no wonder that school mathematics seems pointless and disjointed.