At least for up to high school level, it's because they didn't care if a good part of the class fell behind. If little Jimmy (well, little Ivan, I guess) can't understand how algebra works and is getting only 1s and 2s, it's too bad, he'll have to repeat the whole grade again I guess. The whole "maybe math is too hard and we should just make it optional or dumb it down" that I have seen in US was just not something acceptable or plausible as a policy in that system.

At the same time before we go idealizing that system, what Western folks often see are the best of the best examples. Individuals who went to great schools, emigrated and excelled in the West. They may have gone to better schools, with better teachers, or had parents who cared more etc. They don't see a representative sample. Many schools, especially in smaller cities and villages, were not as great, teachers not as caring, cheating was rampant, bribing teachers even more rampant etc.

Of course soviet system had crime and violence. And these products of soviet system super blew up right after it fell, ceasing opportunity no matter who or what they harmed.

All societies have crime and prisons

At least this 1984 report on "Aspects of Soviet Secondary Education: School Performance and Teacher Accountability" https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/publication/op191_quality_life_soviet_ellison_etal_1984.pdf#page=20 claims that a more ambitious curriculum did not lead to more repeaters ("grade repeating has declined over the years"), but instead "most teachers have chosen the easier solution of adapting their grading practices to the results expected of them." The students who didn't get algebra were apparently filtered out later: "According to the few statistics available on entrance exam results, it seems that somewhere between 20 and 30% of all students fail tests in their chosen field of specialization."

I actually prefer the policy of people repeating the grade, rather than school graduating people who dont understand basic math

The problem is making someone repeat a grade destroys their social life leading to even worse grades later on when they give up on school. You get kids failing multiple times until they complete the mandatory education and then get kicked out without graduating, can't find a job and become criminals. It also takes away from the economy because you start working a year later.

I think there are two solutions. You can make students repeat only the failed class and take it with their normal classes next year like in college. Or a requirement based system where you can only graduate after passing every class on the plan but you can attempt them as many times as you want (even after you're out of school and working full time).

A graduate who can't read or do basic math isn't contributing much to society, and their social life likely isn't great anyway. It's likely better all around that they get forced into learning the basics than pushed along into things they have no chance of understanding.

The problem with that approach is that it disconnects a student from the learning environment.

They now have different classmates they don't have a connection with, they enter the new class having as their identity "the person who failed the previous year", and they'll probably have to sit bored in the classes of other subjects they did pass.

It's almost guaranteed to result in lower engagement.

I'm not denying the opposite is also bad btw. Skipping works sometimes for subjects like history where you'll encounter different topics the next year, but math is impossible to advance without a foundation, and sciences depend on it.

The only good answer is probably breaking the factory-system for schools, where students of the same age are batches going through a pipeline. having students of different levels mixed together like in victorian schools, being able to advance per-subject, something like that.

I went to such a school.

> They now have different classmates they don't have a connection with, they enter the new class having as their identity "the person who failed the previous year", and they'll probably have to sit bored in the classes of other subjects they did pass.

Which is why they, and their parents, work really hard not to fail.

I'm good friends with someone who was left behind on, of all things, history. I spoke to him recently about the experience. Having to be with kids younger than him was really bad for a while. But overall, the experience forced him to work hard. He didn't become a top student, but he's doing well in life and he credits it as part of the reason.

Keep in mind - there is usually a "make-up" exam if they're at risk of being left behind. In my school, they'd know they failed in early June. And the makeup exams were in late August or early September. They had a whole summer to get their act together and pass the makeup.

They did have exceptions: Failing on the languages and some other humanities was somewhat OK.

Your first paragraph is precisely it, at least from my experience living in Eastern Europe for a few years in the 2000s.

>The whole "maybe math is too hard and we should just make it optional or dumb it down" that I have seen in US was just not something acceptable or plausible as a policy in that system.

Growing up in Europe, while preparing for college access exams, my teacher recommended American textbooks for self study.

His reasoning was: "they have the smartest writers in the planet creating textbooks for the world's dumbest students".

It was a stereotypical joke, of course, but I think there was something to the thought. There's a great combination of STEM talent and a cultural expectation for not letting people behind. The latter probably sucks in classroom settings, when you're stuck at the lowest student's pace, but it works for self study material when you can freely skip and advance.

Another thing to add, eastern Europe has comparable talent to western one and US, but a smaller budget.

That made eastern Europeans excel in sciences that needed a smaller budget (e.g. electro chemistry is much cheaper than photonics).

That's kind of what my a college physics professor from Korea told me (he emigrated to US in the 70s). They didn't have the all the fancy lab equipment but had paper and pencils so he got really good theoretical physics.

> They don't see a representative sample.

Indeed. I forgot his name, but there was a Russian professor in the US who emigrated after the Soviet Union collapsed. His blog was full of complaints about the quality of students and education here.

But in one post, he actually said the US system serves the country better. In Russia, you needed a pretty high level of mathematical competence to get a basic engineering degree. Here you don't, and the reality is they still over-educate you in the US for what is actually needed on the job.

My sister went to high school in the US for a year some time in the early nineties - we are Norwegian. She got perfect grades and some kind of award for American history. She explained it by saying, US textbooks wanted you to succeed. Whereas she was used to the Norwegian ones which were only out to rank you (on a bell curve - the grading guidelines didn't have set requirement, but instead told teachers to only give 5% the top grade), and if that meant being obtuse and reader-hostile, that was fine. If you were a really dedicated student you'd push through, right? So she thought it was ridiculously easy, but she didn't necessarily learn less.

I can't speak for the US textbooks at that level, but I can confirm that the Norwegian ones were pretty lousy, especially in history. I particularly remember they loved to hide crucial details in margin notes or image texts.

The U.S. textbooks are so much better than textbooks in many other countries. They are thick and heavy, but then that is because they tend to explain the same concept in multiple different ways so students with different thinking modes can find their own explanation that clicks.

Furthermore, having good textbooks papers over the fact that in the U.S. the qualification and ability of teachers vary so much across poorer and richer school districts. A smart student in a poor school district can use the textbooks to a greater advantage.

When you get new textbooks. You still have the "new books every year or so" vs "we finally got hand-me-downs from our neighbor district after 10 years" divide.

I'd also push back against the idea that district wealth necessarily determines instructor quality. There's a lot that goes into surviving a wealthier area, and it isn't necessarily a matter of skill or experience. How well you navigate the interpersonal gamut also plays in (e.g., are you willing to compromise your ethics to keep happy the over-involved parents who care more about the grade than academic progress?).

Coming from somewhere else, US textbooks feel super watery - low signal to noise ratio, too much hand holding.

Back when they had textbooks. Increasingly the curriculum is online and restricts exploration

Textbooks don’t need a lot of revisions though. Basic math has not really changed that much. One of my favorite textbooks I used as a kid was written ten years before I was born.

When I started Chemistry in college, Professor Zumdahl said to by a copy of the CRC Press Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. Whether it was new or used didn’t really matter - it’s not like Boltzmann’s constant is changing all that often.

Always interesting to revisit the idea of the theoretical role “education” plays in society. One might view the primary objective of school as a sorting machine or one that imparts knowledge for its own sake. These two things aren’t specifically mutually exclusive, but you can have only one “primary objective”.

Only having experience within the US myself, I have always found the idea of “forced ranking” for grades a little odd. Though admittedly, I do skew towards being (perhaps a bit too) idealistic in that sense.

I had a minor experience with what sounds like this style of pedagogy in my high school physics and calculus courses. The lecture and grading styles effectively pitted students against one another. I suppose this works for confident and competitive students, particularly if you can get in the instructor's good graces, but I was merely curious and dealing with self-esteem issues (physical late/never bloomer) and stereotype threat. I continued excelling in my other classes and just switched off in those.

Without getting too into the weeds, I did a lot better in classes where the teacher was some category of "votes blue", identity-wise (race, gender, sexuality, even height).

Bulgarian/USSR Math Circles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_circle and problems they work on are in this book https://bookstore.ams.org/mcl-25

Regular school you would solve problems in combinatorics, algebra and geometry together in class by offering small ideas or strategies then trying each one to point out what works and doesn't work. You do enough of these everyday in class then reasoning about abstract sets in analysis isn't a huge leap. Same reason we used to read Euclid in class and make students demonstrate countless proofs.

CMU Discrete Math course has kind of the same techniques where he solves problems with the whole class https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0K540qqyJJU

The best students then joined the school math circle with professional mathematicians and became TAs like in university helping their regular class.

They tried and failed the soviet curriculum with New Math https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Math

Singapore high school students learn the equivalent of AP Calculus in Grade 10 then either spend years 11/12 at a trade school or stay to earn an associates degree to prep for university covering engineering electives like linear algebra and differential equations.

>> Same reason we used to read Euclid in class and make students demonstrate countless proofs.

Key phrase: "Read Euclid". American schools do not read about math. They are taught to do math. They do not read anything written by the people who created it. They are not given context. They are given set problems and taught how to solve them using prescribed methods. More often than not, this results in lackluster understanding.

I did an AP course at school where we had to write a paper on a subject. Not a problem set. Not a proof. An actual paper about a mathematical concept. I did mine on the mathematics behind various methods for counting cards.

They're not, it's an illusion.

My older sibling went to HS in Eastern Europe and kept the textbooks, because my family had this same reverence towards math over there. I went to HS in Canada and in grade 12 when I was doing Calculus I had a look at the old textbooks and they were the same thing. Different styles certainly, but the problem sets were basically interchange. In Algebra and Geometry, the Canadian books seemed to have much more emphasis on algebra, whereas the eastern european ones had much more emphasis on geometry.

I think the illusion comes from the different rates at which you're expected to pick things up. Grade 8 Canadian math was much easier, so I think the Canadian curriculum was backloaded - easier in the early grades and much harder in the later ones, whereas the eastern european one seemed much more even.

>Grade 8 Canadian math was much easier, so I think the Canadian curriculum was backloaded - easier in the early grades and much harder in the later ones, whereas the eastern european one seemed much more even.

This tracks with British Columbia's secondary school math curriculum. [1] For Grades 10-12, where the grades actually do determine whether you graduate, you're given off-ramps if you can't handle the more difficult math courses. (Workplace mathematics where you'll learn practical applications of math, Foundations of Mathematics where you do Pre-Calc 11 over 2 years instead of 1 for Liberal Arts/Trades programs, and Pre-Calc 12/Calculus 12 for STEM). From Grades K-9, everyone is largely kept at the same level and completing it is largely unconditional (if you're not doing well, they may give you an Individual Education Plan to help you catch up).

[1]: https://curriculum.gov.bc.ca/curriculum/mathematics

I had a copy of "Differential and Integral Calculus" by Piskunov that belonged to my father. The prologue said it was used in the curricula of technical schools in the USSR. I used to think about that fact a lot and tried to imagine what those Soviet technical schools would be like. There was a lot of content there that I did not see in any of the seven math courses we had at uni.

One of my teachers said the only job for her was factory book keeper in some nasty factory. She came over to the US in the 90s and became a CPA then taught college level accounting.

She said a lot of people she immigrated with were overqualified for the jobs in Russia (factory book keeper or technician with PhD level knowledge). The same applied to the US but there were many more options than factory jobs. Her husband was on the technical track and found a job as a professor somewhere.

From the article:

> There are a lot of good points being made in this thread. I have had a theory that it is in part related to the funding available for lab equipment and computers. During the latter half of the 20th century, in Russia you were very lucky to get access to a “real” computer.

Lets not forget that, selling computers (among other products) to Soviet Union and the whole East block was subject to Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (CoCom) established in 1949.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinating_Committee_for_Multilateral_Export_Controls

https://www.gao.gov/assets/nsiad-90-185fs.pdf

"Western export restrictions on civilian computer equipment were lifted in May 1991."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_in_the_Soviet_Union

Well, it seems no different from the current GPU export controls

Not sure what you mean by "their own version of internet", but access to any means of trans-border communication was indeed restricted.

As to computers - it's not like you could walk into a store and buy one, they simply didn't produce them in quantity (central planning economy took a while to recognize that need). But if you could find one, access was not particularly restricted. You could also build a simple home computer yourself if you were into electronics. Schematics were published in hobby magazines and it was a cool thing to do, not something frowned upon by authorities.

Regarding computers, yes and no. I don't think fear of dissent played any role, but rather the availability of western equipment. For example, SM-4 and SM-1420 machines were quite common in the academic institutions in mid-80s. These were clones of pdp-11/45, which means about 10 years gap in computer tech.

Oh yeah for sure, but I think that's the case "in spite of" the trajectory of the educational system.

From my personal experience, people who are successful usually come from highly educated and/or wealthy families. I don't think school plays that much of a role in the grand scheme of things compared to family influences. There's a lot of inertia to society in general.

However, what we lost is that modern educational systems are really bad at identifying and "pulling up" talented kids from poor / under-educated families, because the standards and expectations are so low that you can't differentiate them from their peers.

Anecdata, but in my honors / AP courses in High School, I was one of two students, our of ~30, whose parents did not have a college degree. Like 20 of the student's parents worked at the local Lockheed Martin. I don't think this was entirely genetics, as much as culture, since I knew plenty of people in my life who were quite smart but lacked academic discipline.

I'm more in your camp of "it's culture" but I think it's a lot to do with the amount of attention a parent can pay to their kids education. Some of that is cultural but sometimes it's just a time constraint. Either due to financial constraints (and time spent working), single parents or whatever.

Kids obviously vary in aptitude but the ones that actually get the chance to excel are usually the ones that are getting an extra push at home. Some kids you just can't stop though and excel regardless.

The issue is not what happens in high school.

The issue is that when all of these AP/Honors Calc people get to college they don't even make it to Simpson's rule before they're weeded out. That's the problem that most college professors are talking about. How are we creating more and more and more AP/Honors/"Gifted" kids every year, yet the performance of all of these kids when they enter university is abysmal? How is first semester calculus a "weed-out" course when so many of these kids enter with transcripts indicating they've already taken calculus?

I mean, I can totally see where the professors are coming from. We send every state flagship university what all of these very good high schools claim are the cream of the crop, and many of the students sent are just not up to the task. It has to be the school system at some point?

> How is first semester calculus a "weed-out" course when so many of these kids enter with transcripts indicating they've already taken calculus?

German universities have a simple solution: students who believe that they have already "learned" calculus in school (in a sense every pupil with an Abitur school diploma (the kind of school diploma that you need in Germany to study at a university) had to learn) should hold to this belief at their own peril. :-)

Hint: After one week, these kids will hopefully have realized that the level of calculus that they learned in school was very shallow. :-)

I took a calculus course in high school. There were maybe six of us. Everyone elss took stats. The teacher was fine, if if a bit. Most of us used the class as a goof off segment. I often snuck out to go work on freelancing projects I was doing at the time. We found we could mostly pass the course work could be plugging in to online solvers. The tests were heavily curved.

Frankly if you threw a simple derivative or integration at me these days I'd be staring at you like and idiot.

I remember snidely telling people I didnt care because it didnt need calculus to develop software. I do regret it.

Exactly. The US tech hubs draw heavily from the subset of very talented Americans who aren't seeing the typical dumbed-down part of the education system, and from immigrants, who are over-represented. If anything, they're constantly complaining that they can't find enough talent domestically -- which, yes, is partly "we don't want to pay them enough", but when you consider the costs to sponsor an immigrant, can't entirely be about that.

The small rural high school I attended in the early 80s was unable to find a math teacher able to teach calculus for my junior/senior year, which significantly reduced my college options.

There are plenty of H1Bs who are similarly smart but don't want to build weapons though. At the places I worked these folks would always be paid the same as the locals - they really were hired for talent and not to cut costs. Contributors to Linux, GCC, and the like, not your typical software simian. I guess these days one can get an NIW and not work for the Department of Energy?

> There are plenty of H1Bs who are similarly smart but don't want to build weapons though

Which companies are employing H-1B labor to work on presumably ITAR/EAR-regulated articles?

NIW doesnt mean you have to build weapons.

Simple cybersecurity (offensive or defensive) qualifies for NIW, as well as other fields

Plenty of technological innovation came from the Soviet Union. NASA was created as a direct consequence of Sputnik. America knew they were falling behind in space technology and needed an internal jolt to catch up

I wonder if general wider availability of computers means there were more chances a bright kid would be able to get a start in the field regardless of overall education systems.

I was thinking years ago a western kid in a school that didn't ask much of them still had more chance of getting access to a computer and teaching themselves. But yes, the incentive for Russia kids to study is much more stark.

That might have to do with financial climate (also the reason why there is more innovation in US compared to Europe, at least from the public's perspective).

>But also, look at where almost all technological innovation has happened in the last 50 years

Free market, capital, open borders etc.

During soviet times you research whatever party sees interesting (an exaggeration here) and produce whatever and however Gosplan dictates.

If you don't have to pay for your oil, for example, there is no need to innovate in motors and if all stores are state owned - there is no need in better management, digital goods or networks.

Nobody is fighting for their customers - people just stand in line and at the end of the month you send your books to Gosplan, Statistics etc.

Then 90s. People leaving. Then Putin and Co. People living and while there is a market now - they've managed to recreate old problems still.

Does this say something about innovation requiring only very few innovators (and a lot of more ordinary "sweat workers"? Meaning, so long as the US can pick out, or grow a few innovators, that's fine. It's enough. No need to elevate the mass? A sort of innovators take on Great Man theory? Sincere question/point incase anyone was wondering.

It's plausibly the other way around. Have the best educational system in the world and you can't get anywhere when your economic system is based on politburos and cronyism.

Also notice that the educational system getting dumbed down operates on a generational timescale. If you screw it up for the 10 year olds, it'll still be decades before they're the ones in charge.

The Soviet Union hasn't even existed for 35 of the last 50 years.

> look at where almost all technological innovation has happened in the last 50 years

I take this to mean:

  1) Communism obliterated the Soviet Union's ability to fund science (or anything else for that matter)

  2) The people driving science forward in the West are educated some other way than strictly according to a "Common Core" quality curriculum

your first point is (very) historically inaccurate, on the contrary the Soviet Union heavily funded science and research, which led them to a whole bunch of scientific breakthroughs

Over the past 50 years though (1976 onward)?

Soviets ruled only until 91. So those 50 years speak more about the collapse thereafter. And the cream of their mathematicians emigrating to Israel.

The poster above that mentioned commercialization has it right - while the soviet science was often top-notch, the skills in commercialization and getting the finances to get things done were simply not there, severely eroded by the decades of Soviet time.

The Soviet Union existed for less than half of that time period, and a lot of talented researchers moved to the West after it collapsed. (I know because I've worked with a lot of them). So that's kind of a weird time period to sample. It's like saying if Einstein was so smart, how come he hasn't published anything recently?

Considering 35 of these 50 years is quite literally not the Soviet Union, that list is still long: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Russian_innovation

> The people driving science forward in the West are educated some other way than strictly according to a "Common Core"

And they always have been, in addition to just being more intelligent, curious, and motivated than average.

> ability to fund science

More like "commercialize" rather then fund.

Technological innovation on both sides of the iron curtain happened due to public investment. If you doubt the US role in this, I'll remind that silicon valley and many of its key accomplishments are outgrowths of military spending.

No government spending, no nice things.

I think you're agreeing with my first point but I can't tell.

The west? Plenty of european schools are extremely tough. I think this is mainly an american phenomenon.

It's not "to reduce variance in outcomes." It's "to increase the fraction of students who meet a minimum state standards bar," which is what the school districts and thus the schools are evaluated on. If the schools were evaluated on a metric that rewarded shifting the whole distribution instead of just getting the bottom performers up, we would see different educational priorities, and indeed, we see some of that already in school districts that don't have that many students that struggle to meet the minimum standards.

> the truth is America has given up on "shifting the distribution" to the right.

The truth is that most voters don't care about education. People who run for school boards don't do so with policy recommendations backed by research. They do so solely on backgrounds as mediators between teachers, parents, and administrators. Yes, people skills are needed for the job, but people skills are needed for any job. Making people happy is not the same as getting things done, and you need someone who can do both in any job you are hiring for.

> Its impossible to do so at the lower end, without massive redistribution.

Korea and China have shown that it is possible with the political will. Jaime Escalante has shown that even instilling only student will is sufficient.

But does it really produce better outcomes? At the top? At the 50% percentile? For neither I find the answer obvious.

For the top talented "the west" has the approach to do individual focus, with focus classes and prodigies and all that. It may not hit everybody whom it should and may waste some potential here and there, but it's less scary too and I don't see that it's an obviously worse approach to this skill bracket. (Two data points from top of my head: Terence Tao and Magnus Carlsen, both widely regarded as absolute top in their field, grew up in "the west".)

For the average person, trying to make math approachable and following peoples instincts and interests could be helpful too. I know lots of folks "in the west" for whom even basic math goes over their heads, but I also have quite a few acquaintances from the soviet era who were beaten so hard with advanced math that nothing stuck and they have equal much trouble with very basic math. The conclusion isn't obvious either, to me.

It relates to whether the most competent mathematician is also the best suited person to teach. I'd argue, no. Deep competency in math is a requirement, sure. But so is a firm grasp on pedagogy. I've had my share of excellent math researchers as professors who were utterly incompetent when it came to teaching. Similar with text books.

You bring up some interesting points. I certainly think that you can go overboard in the other direction, like in South Korea, where I'm not sure the crazy intensity of their educational system is necessarily better.

I still think there would be benefits to making education in the west a bit harder, if for anything to build the taste for intellectual effort in young kids. But especially to identify talent who could not be identified otherwise.

It's interesting that you mentioned Tao and Carlsen. Would they have been identified by the educational system had Tao's mom not been a mathematician, and Carlsen's dad a chess enthusiast?

More controversially, assuming "normal" parents, would Carlsen and Tao have had more chance of being identified and pushed towards excellence had they been born in the USSR in the 1950s or in the west today?

I’ve seen the same explanation used for why static and functional languages took off more in Europe while dynamic and object oriented languages took off more in America: American research labs could afford more expensive computers that could handle more runtime overhead. The shining example of this being Xerox PARC with their Alto computer specifically designed to run Smalltalk like a computer from 10 years in the future.

An interesting consideration, but don't functional languages have overhead, too?

A compiled functional language doesn't (have to) have much overhead compared to a dynamic language with a fancy runtime.

The same could be said of a compiled OO language though couldn't it?

My linear algebra teacher was this older mathematician from soviet, who had emigrated to the west in the early 90s. In some casual talks we had, the topic around school systems was brought up - and at least according to him, the old soviet system had a demanding common curriculum, but also one where exceptional students were easily identified and supported.

I think the book is seen more of as a complementary thing to the teacher, not something you're expected to read and understand on your own (unless you're really smart). They give you the cold hard theory, exercises with little explanation and wish you off after that.

I'm from Eastern Europe and studied a bit of math in undergrad and I referenced mostly from American books as everything else was just terrible to learn from. I even read a portion of Spivaks Calculus, which was difficult but great.

I was talking to someone two nights ago who grew up in the USSR. I grew up on Australia. The common thread was after school clubs, and a well funded state run and centralised system for spotting talent, and then scholarships to institutions set up to develop the talent. In Australia the club's are mostly sport, and they fed into the Australian Institute of Sport (which gave you a good rounded education for when you didn't get rich and famous, plus the specialist stuff). The soviets had sports, maths, chess, gymnastics, music ...

One factor that influenced this was the lack of what we consider "nerd culture" in the Soviet Union. To be a nerd, you had to study science. There was no other way. No comic books, no movies. So yeah, math it is.

Scarcity leads to innovation? Sort of like evolutionary pressure makes species evolve?

US STEM education through high school is 2-4 years behind the old USSR. Meaning what was taught to 10-year-olds in the USSR was/is taught to 12-14-year-olds in the US

To paraphrase my old Soviet physics professor:

What separates US and Soviet education systems is that in the former, they try to polish everyone into a diamond, while in the latter they sift through the sand to find the nuggets of gold with maximum efficiency.

It's a common trope that because Soviets had few resources, they were forced to think more. Not sure how true it is.

On a slight tangent, I noticed a similar dynamic with debugging. Most people I meet prefer debugging by walking through the code line by line. I prefer to sit back and think where is a human likely to make a mistake, and then go there. For some reason this way finds bugs very quickly. That said, it's all moot now that LLMs.

supposedly because USSR didn't care much about most of the students, they wrote hardcore books such that a talented student in a remote village will get the knowledge and contribute to building rockets in the future. No one cared for the remaining 99.9 percent of students and their pointless struggles

I went through eastern block's educational system (elementary and high school), the revolution caught me as I started university, I do have personal experience.

Three factors were at play: 1)Not much dumbing down, if you don't get it, you will barely scrape through. The system was not primed for holding back everybody down because of a dumb minority.

2) A dedicated effort to identify the smart kids, direct them to focused high quality schools, encouragement to get involved in serious competitions (mathematical olympiads, but also correspondence seminars) and math clubs.

3) Not so much distracting options to do other interesting things (very unlike the west), so much easier to actually attract and keep the smart kids interested.

The education system is in much worse state now - both 1) and 3) are gone, and 2) is severely affected, mostly by 3).

A Russian friend of mine who was very smart and very good at math clearly comes from what I call the throw your children down a well school of education. It goes like this: “Throw your children down a well. Any child that was not strong enough to climb out on their own was a waste of time anyway.”

I had a Russian coach who described the Soviet training philosophy similarly.

(In a Russian accent) “if you throw many eggs at wall, most will break, but those that don’t are strong egg. Igor was strong egg”

He had multiple top 10s at world championships and 1 medal… definitely a strong egg

This exactly reminded me of the Bulgarian Weightlifting System. You get a large group of students and put them through a high-frequency and high-load system that breaks nearly everyone.

Whoever survives to the end will be a world champion.

Which IMO can also be stated as that saying that goes by "If you want to go faster, travel alone. If you want to go farther, travel together".

There must be a middle ground between setting the bar so high that you will find only the diamonds and setting it so low that almost every rock out there will pass.

I seriously doubt this. There are some many places in life where a little bit of simple mathematical thinking would/could go a long way and you don't need to be particularly bright to understand a lot of it. Almost anyone can learn how to think about different orders of magnitudes of numbers through visual representation, but it just isn't taught very well. The difference between a million, billion, and trillion dollars matters a lot in civic life, and parts per billion are useful for understanding day to day health risks. Anyone can learn that.

No, everyone benefit from higher education from pure production/productivity standpoint. Whether it contributes toward GDP and/or QoL are different issues.

The USSR turned a largely illiterate Russian population to a literate one very quickly. It achieved one of the fastest mass educational transformations in history. In 1917-1920 it went from inheriting a population with 25% literacy to then having 80-90% literacy by 1929-1939.

Not to mention, Proletarianization of Universities (Rabfaks), which accelerated prep schools attached to universities designed specifically for adult factory workers and peasants who lacked formal secondary education. They also built what were essentially trade school-like institutes to rapidly educate people on medical, pedagogical, and polytechnical studies.

I mean, it also had an academic hardcore side to get star students into positions of power and influence, but all successful societies have that. When we see these very same systems in leading capitalist systems like the US, UK, Germany, Japan, or Korea we applaud them for recognizing and empowering talent. Socialist societies are instead somehow criticized for this.

If anything the Soviets were far more serious about educating everyone than their western peers and one of the reasons they become a world power so quickly.

I think echoes of this still exist in Eastern European aptitude.

I've worked with a lot of outsourced development/contractors in my time. Consistently, the best experiences have been with Eastern Europeans.

You might want to check out Moscow State's "Jewish Problems" (hard math problems to throw in people's way): https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556

Because in Soviet block getting education was not mandatory. Today every single parent wishes their kid to get PhD, and pretty .ich everyone is getting some sort of university degree.

FWIW, in my limited experience, this mostly holds for undergraduate level, and the gap is much closer for post-graduate textbooks.

Hence why scientific research is not really worse in the US compared to Russia, as dumb as using textbook as a proxy for development can be.

One past thread. Others?

Why are Soviet math textbooks so hardcore in comparison to US textbooks? (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22941144 - April 2020 (661 comments)

I think there are many reasons and this is just one marker of general education decline in the US. Chrystal's 2 volume Algebra books could hardly be completed by first year university students nowadays, and they are from the turn of the 20th century. I had an American high school physics text from 1948 with dense text, math formulas, and nicely hand-drawn illustrations that served me well in 1976 a few years before I went to High School. By the time I went to university, textbooks started to put in a lot of photos, diagrams, marginalia, and tangent facts, or distractions from uninterrupted development of the ideas students are expected to handle. The shift from books my mom bought me, like The Boy Engineer, which was filled with optimism and enthusiasm for engineering throughout the ages gave way to texts filled with impending disasters, pollution, chemicals, plastics, expected zero-risk in all things. Russian math books are rigorous and thorough, and I have found Indian science and engineering texts to be good for their explanation and continuous development of the core idea, and relevant, graded drills. I have 5 kids ranging from 7 to 29, and I the American text books I have perused for them have become massive and bloated with too much tangent material, distractions. Let's see for my younger ones. They mainly do all work at school, not much homework, and texts seemed to be endless worksheets coming from newsprint workbooks that spread the main point across pages instead of paragraphs. Math is OK, but very segmented, but at least there are some word problems or contextual exercises to get them into applying the math. Let's see when they hit high school. And although I had a Commodore PET 2001 in 1977 with 8k RAM (later 32k upgrade, tell Sam, I know the value of RAM!), a cassette drive, and Commodore BASIC in ROM, I am not a fan of the screen vs. teaching and books, or boards (whiteboards, or screens). I also just watched, "Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die", so this is some fallout... Going to first principles is sometimes a big ask, but skipping everything after a Google search, and deriving a small part on your own is not the way to hypertrophy of the brain. I started looking over the first 3 chapters of Euclid's Elements (Greek on left, English on right, and diagrams) and started to work on it with hopes of dragging my 7 and 11-year-old through some exercises to teach them thought processes in looking at and solving a problem. Then again the Russians faked an advanced fighter/bomber MIG-25, and this pushed America to develop the F-15 in the 70s. It turned out the MIG-25 was heavy (built of nickel steel), hand riveted, and vacuum tube based! I guess you can't judge a book by its cover here.

In Canada they still learn multiplication table in fifth grade, while I was done with multiplication table in my first grade in USSR. I know a math teacher in pre-university college (cegep in quebec) and she is from ex-USSR country and according to her the students coming from high school have very minimal grasp of mathematics and those are the students who go to study engineering and science in university.

I was also forced to learn multiplication table in my country in the first grade. The teacher will randomly select a student from the class (even if you don't raise your hand) and make you recite a number of her choosing. Now my kids are just learning it slowly in 3rd grade.

Usually the main reason to mandate uniforms in poor countries is so that the poorest kids won't be ostracized for not being able to afford trendy clothes.

Or to prohibit street gang affiliation symbols.

You would think that, but my Catholic school's uniform guidelines permitted parents to make a choice of brands, and some of my peers deemed Sears Toughskins to be the wrong choice.

> Same reason poor schools mandate uniforms

The top 6 countries in the annual PISA test are all asian countries where uniforms are mandatory in public and private education (China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Singapore, HK)

Characterise false rigour? Do you mean something that purports to be rigour but is not?

Having worked with East Europeans (Romanians, Polish and Russian) in math heavy domains, the answer I can give is: Culture.

Over here it's acceptable not to know basic things like how to do long division as an adult. In many countries (not just East European), that makes you a "moron". My mother, who hated academics, was never a good student, and refused to go to college, can do all the basic arithmetic on paper. Not because she liked it (she hates math). But because she didn't want to be perceived as a "moron".

Now when you get to Russia, etc - if you want to go into an engineering field, knowing arithmetic on paper is not sufficient. So the bar is raised a lot higher. Even if your career is not going to involve calculus, if you can't integrate by parts simply expressions, you are a "moron" in the tech circle.

They also have "mathematics circles". Kind of like a math club. You get a core set of people (probably less than 10), who meet regularly and work on different math problems. People at differing skill levels in one circle. They learn from one another. The focus is on improving problem solving skills (and fun).

That's why the Russians I worked with in the US were really, really concerned about their kids' education. All they saw were "morons" graduating high school. So the (physical) bulletin board at work often had math tutoring services targeting Russian kids.

I'm guessing that's why the "Russian School of Mathematics" exists in the US.

There are, of course, downsides to being perceived as a moron if you can't do long division or basic differentiation. At the same time, I think it does speak ill of American society that there's simply no bar when it comes to academic knowledge and skills. I wouldn't advocate that you should be considered a moron if you can't do long division. I do think there should be some baseline in society, though.

Right now, it's OK to:

- Not know the difference between cents and dollars. Verizon Math opened my eyes to this, and now I see it everywhere. And people around me don't see the problem - not in the sense of "Why are you making a fuss about this?" but "I don't understand what you're talking about: 0.5c is half a dollar!" I don't bring it up any more lest I be viewed as elitist (by people with advanced engineering degrees).

- Not knowing the number of days in a year or the number of days in a month.

- Not knowing if there is gravity on the moon.

The list goes on and on.

I grew up with students being given grades or scores to easily digest how we are doing and the computation of that grade is very open, like 80% test results 10% classroom participation and 10% project score. I think it's like that can't recall it is too long ago.

Now my kids are being educated and they track them with just three words and I even forgot the words. LOL. Something like this. Progressing is one of the word, mastering something something. I forgot the word for struggling since my child didn't have it. It is still absurd and it's hard to know how the kid is progressing. They still do test and some teachers are discouraging doing assignments. Weird timeline we are in.

How old are they?

When I was a kid, our 1-6 grades were letters (E, G, S, N) that generally corresponded to "above, at, below, well below expectations" The point was to detect what needed extra attention and to help guide focus of the parents and teachers. 30 years later my kids have the same thing but the labels are a bit different. Grades 7-8 introduce A-F and then high school is just percentages.

I've also seen the opposite in a relative's reaction to their kid getting number grades. They fixated far too much 3 or 4 points either way and not the general signal.

Oh the fixation for the 3 to 4 points is a thing in the school when I was young, but not in our family. My classmates families will fight for a point to get the highest honor. One family even exited the school before graduation because he didn't get the highest average and finished his schooling in the rival school.

When I was a kid, a grade below 75% average on all your subjects will make you repeat the level. I think that is not allowed now (repeating a level). My kids are now 5 & 9. They are on an IB program school. They show us a chart of where your kids lands statistically compared to other kids. I don't know where the statistics is derived from. I don't get a straight answer if every time I ask where the progress graph is taken from.

I can't speak for your region but not failing younger kids isn't political here. It's a response to the developed understanding that doing so has worse outcomes, not better. At younger ages there is a much broader range on skill development. My oldest was reading chapter books in Grade 1 and my youngest is still struggling with basic sentences in Grade 3. The solution is that he's allocated some 1:1 time with a teacher who focuses on the weaker spots.

Holding kids back a grade is really just a sloppy solution. It kind of speaks to, "we have nothing to offer. The best we can do is just teach you the same stuff again." It's essentially a sign of bad, or underfunded education.

It's legacy of a of hardcore state-backed rationalist ideology of thr USSR.

Soviet doctrine treated Marxism as an objective, scientific law (I believe that's partially how the ruling class enforced to legitimize its power). Combined with post-WWII competition in space and computing, this mindset institutionalized rigorous STEM education, creating a massive pipeline of uncompromising textbooks, teachers, mathematicians, and engineers.

This partially explains why egineers from former-ussr places are good. They are taught by those and with materials which were produced by above mentioned processes.

I am doing a masters program at a pretty reputable and highly ranked school...there is a good bit of complaining going on about there being too much reading, content being too dense, tests being a useless waste of time...just overall laziness. This is for one of the easier classes in the program. It is too bad, it feels like the rigor is being taken out of everything, any sign of 'effort' being exerted in academics or otherwise is immediately met with complaining.

To be fair, even in highly ranked master’s programs, “rigor” is sometimes improperly used to describe how miserable the student experience is, instead of how deeply students are expected to master some subject. Some of the most “rigorous” courses I’ve ever taken failed to go beyond my undergraduate coursework or to expect any sophisticated insight from me. The TAs would seem confused about some parts of the courses themselves, adding to a sense of “rigor.”

While I seek out courses with high expectations and appreciate a challenge, I do my moral duty when I raise issues about courses that are “rigorous” in ways unrelated to that. When someone says “rigor,” unfortunately these days, you have to confirm what they mean by that word, because some faculty seem to use it as a cover for shirking their responsibilities to their students — or worse, as an excuse for being actively hostile.

We cannot allow incorrect assertions of “rigor” to lower our intellectual standards to that of our most incompetent instructors. Students should advocate for higher standards.

So far in my experience the students actually seem fine with the instructors and TAs, but are complaining that 400 pages of reading over the course of half a semester is too much. They complain that the reading is repeating the lecture material and is a waste of time, or that the papers we are reading are dated(despite the concepts still holding true). By rigor, I don't mean busy work, I mean students don't have the attention span to sit down for any length of period and execute on the material they need to learn. They don't want to study for "useless exams" and don't seem to want to be assessed on anything really.

It's not just California. New Jersey is experiencing this problem too. We simultaneously have gigantic floods of money into school budgets, but also no true oversight. There are all sorts of theoretical laws and guidelines, but they are not enforced by the State Dept of Ed or County Superintendents.

The result is we have control only at the local school district level, which is typically run by a board of locally elected citizens with no idea what they are doing and no experience in either education or running large organizations. The school boards are popularity contests that controls tens and hundreds of millions of dollars with no discipline.

Predictably, in that environment actual learning is dumbed down as far as it can go. Social promotion is rampant, as is grade inflation and things like coloring books being used as far as middle school grades. Huge monies are spent and wasted on technology and consultants.

In NJ, they need to add in hard-core oversight of budgets and get rid of the massive focus on "equity" and social issues, and get back to the Three R's. They are starting to go in that direction with elimination of "screens", but it is being done in a hamfisted way.

Meanwhile they introduce variables in 2nd grade and algebra isn’t a separate concept it’s simply how math is done. Every math concept and operation is slowly introduced with numbers then variables before moving on to the next concept. It’s a great way to do it in my opinion

This is true for most other countries. When I went to school before college, Math was just Math. There wasn't a Calculus or Algebra or Statistics class. You took Math and just did all of it in the Math class over the years, and you couldn't pick and choose. The distinctions only start in College. So everyone who graduated high school at least knew what each of these were about, even if they flat out flunked Math. I can't say how useful that was though.

Who is "they" here?

I use Russian School of Math as a proxy since their curriculum is supposedly based on former Soviet curriculum . They have a bunch of chapters on the west coast

This information was out of date and wrong over 2 years ago: https://share.google/aimode/VZb1Csc0pR47IOIA1

California passed SB1410 which protects access to Algebra, which is a little weird in and of itself, but there it is.

I cannot find any evidence to support your assertion that there is any momentum whatsoever after 2024 for moving Algebra to grade 9.

Almost every school district in Silicon Valley offers multivariable calculus in high school. In the ones that don't, the constituents are pushing to add it. Your description is precisely the opposite of what is happening in California.

It’s the old “ When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”. When everything looks at certain scoring methods to (in the end) determine funding allocation, the incentive is to maximize score over education.

> Ignoring the stabbings and shootings, the children are not disciplined, properly supported, or permitted to excel. The speed of education moves at the slowest students and interrupted by the most disruptive.

"Smart" and "disruptive" are in my opinion at least uncorrelated, perhaps there even exists a non-trivial relationship:

In my observation often children who are either much less or more smart than the average are the more disruptive ones, though the children at the two the ends of this spectrum differ in the kinds of disruptions.

Bell curve. Top 10% of smart are trying to do the work. The bottom 10% are avoiding the work, finding a way to kill their boredom through disruptions. That middle 80% cannot stay or complete tasks because of the disruptions.

Segregation by IQ, GPA, or test scores would help those who are capable of achieving what is possible.

If you care about this, I’d suggest rethinking how much it centers around labeling some children as “gifted” and asserting that they are intrinsically more deserving of higher quality educational opportunities than the other children who were born undeserving.

Really, the general public isn’t that interested in a program that says other children are more talented than their own children, and that their tax dollars should therefore give their own children a second-tier educational experience.

This is the land of opportunity. Why not just offer advanced coursework for all who could reasonably succeed and whose parents are willing to drive to the school every morning?

There was some emergent property of the communist countries, compared to the capitalist ones, that made them want to produce large numbers of highly educated professionals in specific fields, the Eastern bloc with engineers as well as Cuba with doctors. I suspect there are many factors but it should be considered that licensing boards prioritize career safety for existing professionals.