My partner is Hungarian and they put an emphasis on rigorous education across the board that we (in the UK or at least my part of it) don't.
Outside of the upper middle-class and above there is a strong streak of anti-intellectualism in England (I can't speak for the other member countries of the UK) and certainly the case in the working class schools I was educated in, you'd get bullied for been the class swot basically.
I wonder if this is an Austro-Hungary effect or a central Europe thing. Every country I know of that follows the German education system is considered to “put an emphasis on rigorous education across the board”.
Whenever we compare notes from my Slovenian schooling with American friends it seems like the US education system is a joke by comparison.
Although in official rankings we score lower so who knows. Maybe I just got lucky
I believe it's probably a different distribution: european education is maybe flattened around the average, while in the US there is possibly a wider distribution.
Any positive we had at a time comes from socialism’s general focus on education (one of the few positives of it) - eg. both Russian and Hungarian math education went up to differentiation/integration by the end of secondary school. It also had very extensive programs for talented students.
Unfortunately, currently we have seriously laughable pay for teachers (barely above the seriously laughable minimal pay), so we have a bunch of burnt out, old teacher with no motivation.
If we're still talking about "the martians" here, don't they predate the socialist control of Hungary by at least a decade?
UK research also appears to have largely fallen behind world leaders - see mRNA research coming from Germany/US yet the UK having no native knowledgebase of mRNA I know of and producing one of the weakest of the COVID vaccines.