What is real life Maths?

Something in the TES this week caught my eye about this, the same can be applied to English.

What is real life, what is theory?

Is poetry really English, does it really applt tyo post 14 year olds. What about Algebra or Geomtery.

Personally i think it all misses the point. Teaching for today is both short term and fairly irrelevant when today's students are about to enter the workforce for 40 years. Surely we should be teaching that staying ahead of the game in any subject is as important?

And that means having a degree of background and theoretical knowledge (in my view).