My response to that: art, music, literature, geography, and history are all parts of society that are used in your life whether you like it or not. People who have zero interest in math find themselves surrounded by these and have a need to understand them to fit in with society and understand simply their own culture, let alone other ones around the world. Math beyond a relatively basic level, however, sees little to no use by most people in society who do not have a job that requires applying more advanced math to. The prevalence of calculators allows for the jobs that do require regular usage of basic arithmetic to be performed quickly at a suitable speed for their employer.
A major part of the hatred many students have for math is because of poor education standards and attempts to literally force children to learn at a pace that they may not be comfortable with. The vast majority of what is learned in high school math classes (especially the more advanced ones) will actually see any form of use, let alone regular use, among a small minority of students in their adult lives. Whereas their humanities, literature, and art classes provide a better understanding of their culture and history (and provide knowledge that is likely to be used regularly throughout their lives even in casual conversation) and geography classes are vital to surviving in an increasingly global community, the forced standards of math classes after middle school only succeed in teaching complex formulae and rules that will literally not get used by the vast majority of the students who use it.
When people say "I will never use this", they don't mean basic arithmetic and counting like Maddox seems to claim. They mean knowledge that is only going to be necessary for people going into STEM fields. Maybe I understand this better than Maddox because I'm less than 5 years out of high school and 3 years out of college math classes and have clear memories of exactly what the content of all of my courses entailed, whereas his memories are clouded by the fog of 20 years of adulthood.
My response to
that is that I have no idea how your highschool classes in art, music and literature were, but mine were entirely worthless. Literature consisted of reading books, which I did in my own time before highschool, or saying things like "X symbolises Y" because that was what the textbook said X symbolised. Since in my adult life I don't actually go around looking what textbooks say is the symbol for something, this was not very useful (and even if I did, I'm sure I could have figured out the skill of "look up what other people have to say about this" on my own).
My art classes consisted of drawing, or making some crafts, or some such stuff. Even then it wasn't "how to build and draw", it was "here's a list of steps to do this thing in particular". My drawing nowadays is limited to diagrams and function plots and such, and nothing I learned in art class helped at all with that.
My music classes were "here's some music notation. Also, try to play this flute". I don't read music notation nowadays, and I don't play the flute.
How about geography and history and such? It's not like there's that many decisions in my life influenced by the list of successions of presidents during the 20th century, yet that was absolutely required material to pass history class. Sure, a general understanding of the forces that shaped the country is absolutely important, but as it turns out it's much easier to teach and test a list than a general understanding. Roughly similar reasoning applies for all my humanities classes (and, for that matter, most of my science classes. I just remember them better than my humanities classes, because that's how my brain is wired).
The only high school classes I have any confidence I remember almost all I was taught and use it with any regularity are physics and math, because I decided to study physics at uni.
I'm not saying: "All my art classes and most of what I learned in humanities classes was wasted on me, therefore they should be removed from the curriculum". I'm saying that the idea that high school humanities are generally useful and math only helps those that go on to STEM is ridiculous. Most of what you learn in high school is wasted on people who do not go on to be involved professionally in the relevant field, or at least have an independent interest in it. Math is not exceptional in that regard.
The general idea justifying this, as far as I can tell, is two-fold: take classes in a lot of stuff so you are exposed to various fields and can begin to figure out what you want to do later on with your life, and try to impress general patterns of thought rather than specific ideas. My humanities classes utterly failed to impress any general pattern on me, as apparently your math classes failed to do on you, probably because they were poorly taught (not an attack on your or my teachers; teaching properly to a large group of people is a hard and unsolved problem). But there absolutely is a general pattern of thought behind math, and if you can grasp it you can do a hell of a lot with it, no matter whether you actually use calculus or algebra in your life.
All that being said, everyone living in a modern democracy needs to learn some basic statistics. This is as important and day-to-day useful as basic arithmetic, even though it's not as easy and education fails at it as much as it fails on algebra.
