Note that kids don&#x27;t reach the formal operational development stage until they&#x27;re ~11 on average. Until then, expecting them to do abstract (formal) reasoning will be about as successful as expecting a chimp to do so.<p>And, on the converse, in previous centuries, you&#x27;d often see people only start learning math <i>from the beginning</i> in their late teens or early twenties—the time when they first attended &quot;university&quot; without previously attending a grammar or seminary school. These 20-year-olds would be able to pick math all up quite quickly, proceeding from addition and multiplication to calculus and beyond within a year or two.<p>This suggests to me that what we think of as &quot;mathematical aptitude&quot; is far more a measure of developmental age than anything else. I think a large part of why kids hate math is that we try to cram concepts into their brains when those brains aren&#x27;t yet the right &quot;shape&quot; to take in those concepts. I expect that offsetting every part of the mathematical curriculum at least two years upward—if not far more—would do wonders for attrition rates.<p>My belief is that we could even fit all the same curriculum in by the end of public high school: although you&#x27;d be &quot;squishing&quot; more of the learning into the later years, the stronger minds kids would have at a higher age would allow them to acquire each successive concept both more quickly <i>and</i> more thoroughly, serving as a better base for the learning going forward, which would in turn be accelerated by that base.