> it's about learning how to think It's about learning a set of thinking skills, not how to think . Many people who know no math can think and function very well in their domains and many people who know lots of math function and think poorly outside of math.
Math skills (esp proofs) shape the way you approach problems, giving the problem structure and providing you the tools to reduce it into components, relations, and dependencies. To make mysteries unmysterious, such tools are indispensable. I'd go so far to disagree with you that people do well without learning math skill (those tools of thinking). If you can deconstruct a problem, then you certainly learned that skil…
Math is a subset of logical thinking. There are deconstructions of thought that math cannot handle, for example in domains where the axioms are too complex, or perhaps even unknown.