Thats a pretty disconnected statement. The entirety of every single country’s economy and a large part of your daily life runs on language, logistics and infrastructure.
Yet I bet neither high stress traffic management nor fundamentals of phonemes are things you’d consider universal knowledge.
Math leaves “basic knowledge” at the high school stage and enters “expanded logical thinking” without ever telling you while being taught pretty much everywhere in the most conservative, high impact - low retention way.
And Uni math is often just used as a sorting course to weed out people not fit for engineering jobs. Its connection to practical purposes is often faint if not noexistant.
The fact that Mathematicians use nomenclature that makes the IPA look self explainatory doesn’t help.