Not to get too political, myself, but unfortunately, that's a direct result of the people who most tout "freedom" in their policies. What they mean is freedom for large corporations. Big business can do whatever they want. Raise your kids to their precise specifications, though, or they'll hand the buggers over to the Commies (who merely think that kids shouldn't be raised by parents, lest they develop ideologies that run contrary to whatever war needs to happen to raise corporate profits).
Hm. That's actually way too political. Oops.
The problem is that people aren't as organized as they used to be. When I was a kid, parents went to town council meetings and dogged their state and national representatives when something was wrong. Now, we wait for some NGO drone to wander by with a petition, as if a signature actually changes the world.
Then things don't change, so people are frustrated with "government," and actively refuse to get involved. But if people like you and me aren't screaming at our Congressmen, who's left for them to listen to...? It's sort of a parallel to the gun control line: When engaging with the government is crooked, only crooked people get represented.
Change requires two things, at this point, barring the North Korean missile being carried on Qilin-back to Washington and wiping everybody out, which would probably change the rules a bit. First, you need staffers who are interested, because they advise on policy and probably have more sway than the representatives do, on the long run. Second, you need the cost-benefit case that outweighs Hollywood claiming that it loses half a million jobs per year due to piracy despite only having a few hundred thousand jobs total. It needs to be an emotional enough story to get attention, but not so emotional that it's irrational.
My angle is probably too dry: Connecting people has an exponential return on investment, which is a great case for municipal (or even Federal) Internet access, where tax revenues tend to jump about ten percent; against censorship, as publishers worry about what to invest in and citizens make decisions on poor information; and against strong Intellectual Property law, as the raw materials of storytelling and technology get gobbled up by people who are invested against seeing the next developments happen.
As for the algebra thing...I don't know. I think it's possible to teach algebra to someone who can barely count, since the concepts don't rely on numerical calculation. Most of the examples I can think of are more calculus than algebra (like the best place for a lazy dog to catch a thrown ball, qualitatively, or how much time it'd take to fill up a weirdly-shaped fish tank), but it's feasible. However, you definitely can't teach the topics by the standard syllabus. In fact, every approach to algebra I can think of that doesn't rely on arithmetic is sort of...instructor-averse, like graphing methods.
No, wait. Actually, during the brief window when I was taught math (post-"New Math," pre-"New New Math," I believe was how they put it to my parents), it was through modular (or "clock," to kids our age) arithmetic. And that actually is algebra used as the tool to teach arithmetic, where 472 is 4x10x10 + 7x10 + 2, and you get multivariable "equations" by moving to something like time. (That was a relatively poor public school, by the way, nothing fancy.)
Or maybe that was the tail end of New Math, since it's basically how the Tom Lehrer song goes. Again, though, teach like that, and the administrators push you out to sea on a burning boat, because "that''s not how things are done" anymore.
But I also think that math is covered to abstractly, and the rise of the "word problem" has backfired into contorted ideas that make even less sense to the kids who didn't understand the original idea. I've yet to see a kid older than maybe four who can't add (or know to count up) but can suddenly do that when you instead ask how many apples or whatnot they have. I'd much rather the problems be real, ideally connected with people, like making a shopping list from a handful of recipes (and doing so for a restaurant, where each recipe is used a bunch of times, for bigger kids).
To me, math is like reading. You need to know how to do it, but it's not really a topic that's separate from the rest of the curriculum unless you want to make it hard...and that's actually the goal, for a lot of programs--they're designed to feed into PhD programs, not society.
