Math education: It’s not about numbers, it’s about learning how to think
Learning &quot;how to think&quot; is just one part of it. The other part - the one that makes it <i>much</i> more difficult for many, if not most, people to learn math - especially the more abstract branches of it - is learning to think about math <i>specifically</i>. The reason is that mathematics creates its own universe of concepts and ideas, and this universe, all these notions are so different from what we have to deal with every day that learning them takes a lot of training, <i>years</i> of intensive experience dealing with mathematical structures of one kind or another, so it should come as no surprise that people have difficulty learning math.