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Comment by tryauuum | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

So that was Bane's school then...

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 disagree. I lived in Russia for a couple of years in the early 90s right after the fall of the USSR and found the average person to be quite well educated, not only in math, but also science and literature (Russian literature of course), more so than I found the average person in the US to be. The level of education in Russia post-USSR has declined substantially--one factor being brain-drain that began once the doors for emigration were cast open.

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.

The bottom 50 probably don’t benefit from math education anyway.

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.

I find that often the bottom 50 struggle with addition and subtraction. Algebra is probably of no value if you can’t do that

Anyone can learn to add and subtract if you don't teach it like absolute shit.

I really think there is a subtle in-between line in the parent comment that trying to educate idiots must be counterproductive, beyond being just difficult or ineffective.

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?

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

When we we're looking for a HS for my daughter the selective public schools were weirdly like that. They tended to pound the kids with little to no hand holding - I likened it to tossing the kids into the deep end of the pool and shouting advice to them about how to swim.

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.

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.

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