I analyze survey data for a living, and the more I dig into how people interpret statistics, the more convinced I become that we're teaching math all wrong. A colleague recently showed me a chart where 78% of respondents favored a policy, but when asked to explain what that meant, most couldn't say whether the margin of error mattered. We emphasize formulas and calculations in school, yet leave students unprepared to question a misleading average or a cherry-picked percentage they'll see in headlines. Yes, some numeracy improves with practice, but without critical thinking baked into statistics education, we're just training people to compute rather than evaluate.