Nah, I love lots of popular things. But I can also separate my personal enjoyment of something from its inherent quality.

A book series so poorly written, you’ll never believe the author did so on purpose.

Sure. And for the 90% of kids who correctly say they won’t use math, it doesn’t matter. We are doing math so they can learn to navigate formal systems of reasoning. We could honestly teach deductive logic instead, or set theory, or group theory, or finite field topology. It doesn’t have to be algebra or anything remotely practical.

Yep. We don’t teach kids math so they can learn to do math. We do it so they can develop an intuition for abstract reasoning.