I have a different take on this situation (thought it bears some resemblance to "Explanation #2" in the article). My years of experience in maths education has led me to the conclusion that the role of maths, particularly in child education, has, or should have, little-to-nothing to do with maths itself: it is a means unto a different end, and should not be used as the end unto itself.<p>For example, why do we make (US) high-school students study elementary algebra? You would be hard-pressed to find an application of the quadratic formula in everyday life, and yet I maintain that it, and the course at large, has an important pedagogical role. All pre-collegiate levels of maths education (arguably including elementary calculus, but certainly everything before that) presents the student with increasingly complex situations, the tackling of which requires increasingly complex problem-solving strategies. From this perspective, all levels of maths education are effectively drilling structured logical reasoning, problem decomposition, pattern matching, rule application, abstract thinking, abstract/concrete translation, precise/"technical" communication, etc. Maths simply provides a rather nice vehicle for presenting these concepts in an ordered fashion with natural increases in complexity. I even believe that the introduction of integers to pre-schoolers is a valuable vehicle for introducing causality and linearity of time.<p>Along the way, there are certainly valuable real-life skills that are clear applications of maths concepts, and I would agree with the article that most maths programs are woefully deficient in really underscoring the value of these applications. The article opens with a comic about needing "two-thirds of three-quarters", but anyone who has ever scaled a recipe, or worked with so-called "bakers percentages" knows that this is far from being simply a theoretical word problem.<p>As an aside, I spent a number of years teaching elementary arithmetic to adult students (usually in their 50s-60s, and, without a hint of hyperbole, commonly unable to solve "2 + 2" without memorization). My role was to find creative ways of communicating arithmetic concepts to people for whom the traditional approach often failed. This strengthened my belief in the above perspective by providing an interesting corollary: many of these people had come to learn the "maths-adjacent" skills, traditionally taught via maths instruction, in fascinatingly creative ways. If the ordering and equal-spacing of the integers was not something they were able to truly grasp as children, sometimes they would surprise me with their approach to other parts of their lives for which perhaps you and I would have a more "normal" solution to.