Why are Soviet math textbooks so hardcore in comparison to US textbooks? (2017)
quora.com
quora.com
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.
That’s a bingo. Most people meet the Russians who escaped during the post-Soviet brain drain, they don’t meet the people who stayed behind. Many of whom became gangsters and turned the country onto anarchy. They were products of the Soviet education system as much as anyone.
Remember when the US had a hurricane somewhere in the South (Kathrina?), people just went looting all retail stores, same as what happened during BLM riots, the current riots in Paris, etc etc
> But rather a sign of decaying times (the fall of the USSR and the economic hardship).
Nope, people turned to crime, because it was available. You did not seen poor people turning to crime because of economic hardship, you have seen average people or people with money to turn to crime, because there was good crime opportunity.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thief_in_law
The winners in our system are just the ones who get everyone else to kowtow and do the work, leaving leadership ignorant and inexperienced but lauded for some reason
It's a weird reverential system where figments of imagination still earn great amounts of deference; figment of out imagination being the American civil religion and hierarchy of figureheads who don't even know you exist; why would they care?
How reliant this culture is on bowing to figureheads painted on walls while talking like it isn't is a bizarre cognitive dissonance that should be studied for centuries
Like who? Trump?
> The winners in our system are just the ones who get everyone else to kowtow
In soviet system, connections were literally everything. Not merit, not achievement, but who you know, who is your friends, who trades favors with you.
The overall pattern over time: vastly less brutality and political violence, less insane unpredictability, more corruption and cronyism and cynicism, and much fewer paths for truly talented people to rise to the top.
https://www.nytimes.com/1948/09/27/archives/pure-mathematics...
Seems like every system is like that then and not just the soviets.
I know it is off topic but I am interested in the soviet constructivist mathematics and somehow their political system fascinates me.
It is not equally bad in every system.
Can’t be. Didn’t he graduate near the bottom of the class? And I think W also had mediocre grades. Eisenhower was in the lower half of his West Point class as well. There are probably numerous other examples of successful American politicians who were poor students. Just recently Gavin Newsome got into a bit of trouble touting his low SATs in front of a mostly black audience. There’s a longstanding anti-intellectual streak in the U.S. that politicians have been pandering to for ages.
Wow, perhaps we were never so different after all
That's a spicy take on the political legacy of the professional managerial class. /s
(Yes I know you meant politicians and politics adjacent high level bureaucrats, academia and industry)
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.
> 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.
There wont be any impact on students, because every year every class is reshuffled slightly, and every 3-4 years you change school altogether
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).
The school is supposed to be a safe learning environment, not a simple daycare.
learning means giving a feedback to improve. If you destroy the feedback mechanism that gives negative news, then people stop learning altogether.
Imagine trying to train a neural network, but you dont have backpropagation, because negative feedback is bad. So you stick to throwing noodles at the wall and hope something will stick
Unfortunately that is just manifestly untrue in America, which is part of the problem. You have parents who make a nice living on their “street smarts” telling their kids “you’ll never use algebra in real life” and “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” Thus the contempt for education is passed down generationally.
When those signals become sufficiently polluted, employers will invariably turn to some other signal.
Lowering the standards is a move politicians often make because it "solves" the problem you outline in the short term, even though it's ultimately self-defeating because it directly undermines the virtue signaling function of academic credentials. It's a "solution" which requires no funding, no changes to teaching practices, and no changes to the ways schools are organized. So it's attractive and politically feasible even though it's harmful and profoundly stupid.
The solutions you've proposed are the right kind of solution because they preserve the signaling function of credentials. But so far they're approaches that public schools and the governments that run them seem politically incapable of taking.
There's also something else to confront here in that even when the competency signaling functions are intact, academic and professional credentials are also to some extent scarcity goods, valuable precisely because not everyone has them. So if you solve all of these problems and you still allow grades to at least attempt to fulfill their purpose, a functional and coherent grades system will, to some extent, always perform differentiation of the labor market or be obviated by its failure to differentiate. The inequality that you see manifest as students who fail to graduate falling behind in life is actually downstream of the schools, and it has to do with how many seats are available for what kinds of jobs in the economy. If you address the former without addressing the latter, the real social justice impact is going to be limited.
And you ultimately can't educate your way out of having a working class; at some point you have to look elsewhere for assuring the dignity, security, and comfort of people who academically underperform relative to others. The working class as a whole must be made livable, instead of pretending we can shove everyone into its most comfortable sections (the "middle class") through education.
Thinking back, different era and country, but fear of failing was much much bigger than not getting an A.
Currently there are no short term consequences to failing. Won’t this provide a motivation to a set of students to do better. The ones who’re going to fail are the ones suited to trade or other jobs, and other avenues later in like to get high school diploma. Maybe this is not the right time in their life and they need different help than being mindlessly promoted in school.
I think that applies to people more broadly. Many of us have, at one point or another, had to face down severe consequences to give us the motivation to break out of a downward spiral. Almost by definition that means a few will fail to do so but if the consequences don't have any teeth they don't serve as motivation.
I am from Germany where repeating a grade is quite common and uhm what? How does it destroy their social life?
It isn't even as bad as changing school as you can still see your friends. I don't remember anyone being traumatized or ostracized by having to repeat a grade. Also some high performing students are also allowed to skip grades and no ones says that it ruins their social life.
Sometimes students just need an extra year to mature.
That made eastern Europeans excel in sciences that needed a smaller budget (e.g. electro chemistry is much cheaper than photonics).
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.
For example Gregory Mankiw's Economics textbook is 800 pages.
Russian economics textbook by Tarasevich is 374 pages
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.
In my personal experience, it's much less related to circumstantial opportunities. The ladder was derived from Germany (the model country for engineering and science) and more or less worked in practice. Of course you had better chances if you had right relatives or friends or simply happened to live near a famous school, but all my extended family and most of my circles early on in my life were Soviet engineers and scientists, and about half of them were from the absolute middle of nowhere. For example my uncle and dad were born in tiny villages that never changed since the 19th century, and still graduated from top universities as a physicist and biochemist, simply because they got noticed for their results and worked their way through. If you look at top Soviet scientists, a lot of them were like this.
However the downside of that system was that talents were filtered extremely early on, and you had no second chances to change the course of your life. You had exactly one opportunity in life to become someone, and you were forever stuck with your "choice" made at the age of 14-16 the latest. I'm glad I was lucky enough to grow up after the crash. It still works this way in many countries, actually.
Agree. That's why I just referred to the policy as "not something acceptable or plausible in that system". As in, officially they would still tout that there are high standards and attempt to teach at that level, but teachers will just pass people anyway sometimes or just devolves to simple bribery and cheating. In US on the other the hand, the criteria is officially dumbed down and lowered to let me people pass and feel less stressed or bad about not understanding algebra, for example. Some kids could go faster and learn at a more advanced level but having them in a "special" class would make others feel "bad", so everyone is held to a lower standard. I don't remember which state did that Oregon, maybe New York? But something like that was going on.
That hardcore math was only in schools that specialized in math. In post-Soviet times, if you had a good engineering university nearby, the juniors and seniors were heavily encouraged to attend additional evening math classes there as well. But if you were in one of the "humanities" schools, the requirements were way more relaxed and they would not make you repeat the grade, they would just give you a 3-.
This is true. At the same time the Soviet Education Ministry recognized the fact that many schools and teachers are sub-par, and they went to great length to create books for self-study. Math text books curriculum was curated by Andrey Kolmogorov [0] himself with the help of talented stuff. There was monthly Quant magazine (STEM for high schoolers) and a "Quant library" -- short books written by math/physics/chemistry experts for the high school audience. This was very helpful for smart kids that were not in Moscow or Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg).
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.
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.
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?).
If you look at older textbooks, before education publishing became the extortionist big business it is today (like, say, Pauling's book on general chemistry[0] - which you can still get from Dover - to name one), you will find many that are lucid and intellectually satisfying. Heck, look at scholastic pedagogic texts (like the Summa[1]) and you can follow exactly what's being said. Even if you don't grasp something, or grasp it correctly, it isn't because the writing or presentation are shit. It's because you need to keep going, but you know how to keep going. You have handles on the content and not just some huge, impenetrable, and slippery orb looming over you.
It's eye-opening, because our entire media regime, and the sensibilities it entrenches, seems to suggest that education used to be dull, mindless, and joyless before the great "progressive" innovators blessed us with their wisdom, forgetting the origins of the artes liberales and some of the 19th and 20th century turns[2] that did actually debase education into something vulgar by comparison, something convenient for industry and the state.
[0] https://archive.org/details/generalchemistry00paulrich
[1] https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.I.Q1
[2] I am not claiming everything was perfect centuries ago, or that there were no good pedagogical developments since then.
It seems like the publishers feel guilty about charging how much they do and try to add bulk in weight and volume to make the customers feel not so bad -- sugarcoat the rip off somewhat.
Sometimes it is so frustrating that it makes me want to yell -- stop faffing around and get on with it.
This is a recent phenomenon though. American books from the 70s or 80s do not have this problem.
Maybe you are thinking of high school or middle school textbooks?
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).
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.
Some years ago, at a first-tier US university, with students tending wealthy, it was suggested that they had long had such excellent teachers, well-resourced and supportive, explaining things so organized and clearly... that the incoming students now lacked both the skills and inclination, to wrestle with a body of knowledge and extract their own understanding.
As we work towards AI for excellent teaching, perhaps we should think of that as an incomplete goal.
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.
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.
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.
> 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_Mul...
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_So...
If you were working in military research, you got access to western computers. Academics, generally no. Companies, never. Even party members couldn't get access.
So no this is yet another victim of the priorities of communism: priority #1 is preventing dissent. And I hope you do at least understand why that means "no computers, and certainly no networks".
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.
Agreed on that, and access to a computer system, e.g ES mainframe or SM family was not a problem for people who wanted it. I was in high school in mid-80s. I found a fortran book in the library, and it took me very little time to get access to the university-owned SM-1420, RSX-11, and a fortran compiler. That same lab ran free programming classes in the evening with faculty volunteers.
"But by the early 1970s the idea of transcending the status quo was abandoned by the Soviet leadership, who felt the system threatened Party control of the economy."
And that was that, for the idea of connecting Soviet computer networks or directly connecting people in the Soviet union (without party-controlled channels in between).
(This is a layered jibe.)
But also, look at where almost all technological innovation has happened in the last 50 years
Or to put it more generally: motivation.
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 curriculumThe 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.
More like "commercialize" rather then fund.
No government spending, no nice things.
And they always have been, in addition to just being more intelligent, curious, and motivated than average.
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.
American elites abandoned Americans after the Soviet Union fell. Only useful as a servant class. They also encouraged parents to abandon their children. Immigrant parents come here and work like mules, spoil and dominate their children, and would never imagine that kicking them to the wolves was a virtue. In the US (and in the West in general), we teach working people to have contempt for their own offspring; it's counter-evolutionary. Meanwhile Western elites spare nothing for their dimwitted failchildren.
The default I expect from any intellectual or technical achievement is a truly challenging last name.
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.
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.
As someone acquainted with the insides of AI labs, and who has worked with NIWs in the past, I can tell you the extent to which our advances are dependent on migrant brainpower long ago crossed the "we're able to deny it" threshold.
Most people think of skilled immigration as H1Bs. It's not. H1B is to NIW as TF/PyTorch monkey is to real AI expert. They're just not, at all, the same thing.
Which companies are employing H-1B labor to work on presumably ITAR/EAR-regulated articles?
Simple cybersecurity (offensive or defensive) qualifies for NIW, as well as other fields
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 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?
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.
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. :-)
There are innovations and discoveries made and exploited everywhere. How much things seem to be going on relative to your cognitive capacity has not much to do with the reality.
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.
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 don't know enough about Tao to comment, but the story of how Carlsen learned chess suggests that he'd not become the world's top player in a soviet style chess education program, in contrast to how he self-taught in an environment in Norway that let him follow his interest pretty much freestyle.
Its impossible to do so at the lower end, without massive redistribution.
So the next possible action is to paper over the giant hole in the wall with plaster and pain and pretend that "everything is ok, according to standards"
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.
PISA result distributions are completely different
From what I understand, a reliable "America vs. China" IQ comparison is mostly hopeless.
Although I guess smalltalk has had a (JIT) compiler for a long time, so it's more about runtime/bytecode efficiency (with dynamic types) vs native compilation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
on hardcore.. well, idk, we went through intergrals and simple diff equations, and special relativity theory in 10-11th grades. (14-15 yro). It was not that hard.
She wrote a short memoir about her student years, 1923 to 1929. She studied mathematics, of course. She mentions that a typical assigment for a part if a course was like that: here's a book or article that covers the topic, read it to prepare. Thing is, the reading material often was in a foreign language: German, French, etc. It was considered normal that the student will learn the language to the level sufficient to read it merely as a part of the process.
To me, it seems US is emotionally invested and being stubborn with the idea that natural selection and power concentration is key to competency, and universal measures are risk factors for the all-important elimination processes, despite there being ample proofs that that is not even a sane line of thinking and distribution of most things just keeps making huge returns.
Otherwise, let's assume the bottom 50% actually can't be educated, is it waste of whose time or resources to try?
(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
Whoever survives to the end will be a world champion.
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.
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.
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).
The private schools would get the kids to the same place but they'd toss tons of resources at any kid who needed it to get them to that place. Unless the kid was disciplinary; in that case they'd show 'em the door.
Rock bottom was the non-selective public schools. I don't think it was that they didn't care it was ended up with a lot of kids that those first two groups wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole. Not just kids who didn't want to be in school (which would be tricky) but one's who's parents didn't care if they were in school. That enough trouble that it creates trouble for the kids who want to be there.
This isn't to say that the USSR had a better system than the West--it did not, and its collapse is testament to that. But strictly in terms of education in math, literature, science, it did quite well. Similarly, Cuba did a _much_ better job at educating its population than its Caribbean neighbors.
Why are Soviet math textbooks so hardcore in comparison to US textbooks? (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22941144 - April 2020 (661 comments)
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.
The usa doesn't value its citizens education unless you belong to the top club and pay, europe is better and eastern europe used to be the best since that was all they had.
This is coming from someone who went through the Swiss (probably was amongst the best in western Europe) and eastern European education systems.
The east math was simply much harder, deeper and on a better level. That is all there is. Look, China is valuing the education of their citizens and they are up and coming fast.
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.
In America, they buy or build a $1 billion supercomputer and hire 5 engineers/programmers.
In the USSR, they take an old, eight-story Tsarist-era building in Moscow—with a view of the Neva—and fill it with 1,000 mathematicians armed with slide rules, chalkboards, and chalk.
The result is the same.
> faced with the fact that ball-point pens would not write in zero-gravity, the Fisher Space Pen was devised as the result of millions of dollars of unnecessary spending on NASA's part when the Soviet Union took the simpler and cheaper route of just using pencils
This has been debunked apparently, but I still think there's a general truth to it.
The interesting assertions here are that NASA and the Soviets didn't spend money to develop the Fisher Space Pen or its special ink, but they procured it once it was being manufactured.
And that both NASA and the Soviets had initially used pencils, with their associated hazards. Every time I read that line "Soviets used a pencil" I experience a vivid mental picture of me as an astronaut, pressing the surface so hard that the lead breaks, and little bits drift around in microgravity. Don't get me started on mechanical pencils.
But I did own a Space Pen, and I used it often during high school, and it wrote very well in Earth gravity. It was refillable, and very elegant, in a featureless polished stainless-steel body with a knurled grip, and the cap could be secured when open. Today, I use Pilot G2 gel rollerball, 0.7mm in black or blue inks. Accept no substitutes!
> It was refillable, and very elegant, in a featureless polished stainless-steel body with a knurled grip, and the cap could be secured when open.
Why did I have to read this sensual description, I want it now. (:
> Pilot G2 gel rollerball, 0.7mm in black or blue inks
I looked this up - I see what you mean, it looks well-made without being expensive. I plan to try them, I've been missing the feel of a pen and notebook.
Seriously, public schools in California are proposing removing the advanced math classes completely. This is not an old story, this is now.
you are not familiar with public education here. In one coastal city, more than 40 languages are spoken by students at home, with Spanish being a large component.
What I am saying is that 9th grade through 12th grade public standard curriculum is the topic of debate, with some groups, today, advocating removal of "advanced placement' courses in a broad way.
There is massive difference between certain particular schools, and the broad standardized, State-assigned curriculum.
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.
California passed SB1410 which protects access to Algebra, which is a little weird in and of itself, but there it is.
Keeping the "clever poors" in their place seems to be one thing the left and right agree on.
The teachers cannot fail a student so the illiterates move up with the educated, where the gap becomes evident, the disruptions turns to abuse and attacks because the feral children cannot maintain civility.
"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.
Segregation by IQ, GPA, or test scores would help those who are capable of achieving what is possible.
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?
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.
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.
As someone who hated undergrad math and physics approaches to vector calculus--until I found _Div, Grad, Curl and All That_--I'd argue that shitty hard textbooks are just shitty. There seems to be a cultural bias toward asceticism here, where suffering purifies the soul.
I've worked with a lot of outsourced development/contractors in my time. Consistently, the best experiences have been with Eastern Europeans.
The way math is taught in the US is essentially free-floating, foundation less, and understanding-free: https://profkeithdevlin.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/lockh...
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)
Nah.
In Argentina, public primary school kids have a white uniform to imprint a sense of being among equals, no matter their families social standing.
- increasing pay and benefits for teachers to the maximum possible
- reducing accountability for poor teaching to the minimum possible
That's it, there is no other explanation.
Stalin took the reigns of a devastated, poor, agricultural society and left it as a nuclear armed superpower who won WW2. The State had the goal of being a strong state and educating its people to be strong people
It wasn’t always this way. For most of the twentieth century, American schools were advanced when compared to foreign schools.
It’s mostly due to broad lowered standards and expectations, low standards for teaching, phony credentials. But the US DOE hasn’t helped either. It would be best to move its entitlements to another agency, and abolish the remainder. It’s overseen the biggest academic decline over the past 50 years. Outside of the entitlements, even its supporters couldn’t name a single good policy.
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.