I have relatively little mathematical education and have been seeking to correct that by self-educating over the last year, so I have a certain bias. Nonetheless, I disagree with the key points of this article.
The article asserts that most modern professional jobs requires only "Excel" and 8th grade programming. In my experience, over-reliance on software like Excel rather than a basic competency in numerical programming is a hindrance to economic growth. Spreadsheet-based numerical programming is opaque and ill-suited to interoperation. This leads to subtle errors, duplication of work, difficulty of replication and silo-ing of meaningful results in the private sector, the public sector and academia.
I take the second point that the transferability of critical thinking skills developed by learning mathematics is unproven. Nonetheless, history is flush with anecdotal evidence of this hypothesis, and in the absence of empirical evidence, it seems unwise to reject that hypothesis out of hand.
EDIT: removed an assertion that the article was poorly argued.
What are you using to self-educate? I'm kind of doing the same. I decided to start with "Mathematics for the Nonmathematician", which so far is good (only on chapter 3 though).
I'm cobbling it together — I looked at what the requirements were for various universities' math degree programs and then found classes on Coursera, MIT OCW, etc., which matched those as well as possible.
I've also found QuantStart's guide[0] to be a particularly good resource, but bear in mind that is oriented toward learning quantitative finance (in which I have no particular interest per se).
The article asserts that most modern professional jobs requires only "Excel" and 8th grade programming. In my experience, over-reliance on software like Excel rather than a basic competency in numerical programming is a hindrance to economic growth. Spreadsheet-based numerical programming is opaque and ill-suited to interoperation. This leads to subtle errors, duplication of work, difficulty of replication and silo-ing of meaningful results in the private sector, the public sector and academia.
I take the second point that the transferability of critical thinking skills developed by learning mathematics is unproven. Nonetheless, history is flush with anecdotal evidence of this hypothesis, and in the absence of empirical evidence, it seems unwise to reject that hypothesis out of hand.
EDIT: removed an assertion that the article was poorly argued.