I see my previous answer got a negative vote. Can someone explain why? This is a very serious issue. The mathematical community should be ashamed of the way math is presented to the public in the only place most people ever see it: required Required courses taken by students who are there only because it's required.
Mathematicians say of "college algebra" courses and the like that the students should have learned the material in high school and irresponsibly dropped tbe ball and neglected to do so. Therefore mathematicians don't want to devote effort to it. They assign the most inexperienced people in math departments to teach it, or they assign it to people with Ph.D.s in education who are brilliant at teaching technical skills, and do brilliant psychological research, but don't know that math doesn't consist of technical skills any more than music does (music requires long hours of honing technical skills, but everybody knows that's not what it's all about). Or when the latter do know it, it's just something they've heard, not something in which they have professional expertise. There is work here that ONLY mathematicians can do, that ONLY mathematicians have reason to want done, and mathematicians have been unwilling to do it.
