People gladly learn art, music, literature and geography.
This is not true. I've known enough people who are fully satisfied with the ugly stick men school of artistic expression, desired fervently to smash their music-class instruments for the catharsis of the act, would sooner self-flagellate than read something long and terse from the literary canon, and can't read a local road map let alone decipher a complex topography.
The reason people complain about math, it's damn boring. It's tedious, repetitive, and if you make a careless error at any point -- it's worthless. Cooking is forgiving. It has movement, smells, textures, tastes, and the allure of creativity. Music captures the imagination, our emotions, our inner being -- creating it or listening to it can drive us into ecstatic bliss or deepest despair. Even if you lack the talent for it, the attraction is plain. Literature? go into an endless stream of different worlds and experience them in the technocolor of your imagination. There are accepted methods to literary criticism, but no absolutes, just an endless stream of arguments and interpretations which change with every reader. Geography? The world is an interesting place, both how it works physically and how it's shaped anthropologically. At any rate, geography is to any significant depth expressed in mathematical terms and equations, relatively complex ones at that.
What you can do with math is remarkable and enthralling, math is just a tool to do more interesting things with -- the actual process of learning and using said tool is deeply and unremittingly tiresome. Showing haughty disdain for anti-intellectuals is natural I suppose, and people
should learn and retain the knowledge at least to the level of secondary school maths, but expecting them to like it because it's important to our civilization and more importantly -- because you like it -- is just being supercilious.
I have no practical knowledge of agriculture, in spite of its impossible importance to our civilization and species for the last 10 thousand years, I don't consider this a character flaw. I'm not going to mock farming, but I'm certainly not going to do a couple months hard labour on a farm to familiarize myself with the practice. I have no interest in it, it's difficult, and from my perspective I have better things to do.
