Our article aims at clarifying the basic problems of teaching mathematics in primary and secondary schools, as well as the basic problems of the education of future mathematics teachers. The article points to a decline in the quality of current journal contributions dedicated to teaching mathematics. The contributions should provide assistance to the teachers of mathematics in their demanding work, but unfortunately they often deal with topics that do not have much in common with mathematics, discuss banalities, and moreover often contain serious mathematical errors. All this occurs even in the articles of renowned pedagogues of mathematics.