To learn maths properly, you have to enjoy it, love it even.
You need to be stimulated by the curiosity of the unknown,
and the challenge of problem solving. You need to know
the hit your brain gets when you manage something.
It is like this with music: if you want to learn an instrument
over the years to a high degree of skill, you need to love
the instrument and enjoy the many hours of practice it takes.
Remove that positive reward-driven learning, and replace
it by fear-of-failure-driven learning, and as soon as the opportunities
to fail dry up, so does the motivation. So you get the people who
passed maths at 16 and then promptly forgot it all and never
touched it again.
Fixing that fear-of-failure problem by just removing the
fear-of-failure doesn't fix it. If the positive connection isn't
there, and there is no fear of failure, the student simply
won't be motivated to learn.
It's not rocket science. It's simple psychology.
But the people running the education system are
as inept at doing that, and understanding the psychology
of learning, as the kids are getting inept at doing
maths because it's being forced in the wrong way.
In an industry obsessed West, we want the school
system to reliably manufacture units of educated
teenagers who can be put to use by industries
that can't be done by robots and AI. This is tragic.