I assume because they had not adopted the "dumb everything down to reduce variance in outcomes" educational ideology that has taken hold in most of the west over the past 50 years.
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 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 taking calculus?
I mean, I can totally see where the professors are coming from. We send them 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?
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.
>From my personal experience, people who are successful usually come from highly educated and/or wealthy families .. [from overseas]. FTFY
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.
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 think you mean it was the Soviet Union. Either you scored excellently and were sent to university or at least into engineering, to end up well-paid and comfortable in military research or you scored less than and worked on the fields ... Or were sent into war as cannon fodder.
>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.
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).
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.
that's a bit too delulu... That's just your sampling bias. Of course a media predominantly feature contents in US English gives you impression that most things are happening in the US.
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.
> 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
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?
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.”
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.
No, everyone benefit from higher education from pure production/productivity standpoint. Whether it contributes toward GDP and/or QoL are different issues.
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.
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.
If anything the Soviets were far more serious about education than their western peers and one of the reasons they become a world power so quickly.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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)
Here in California, apparently algebra is "too hard" for 8th graders.. the tests scores look bad, so "algebra" is now a target of political action.. to remove it.
Seriously, public schools in California are proposing removing the advanced math classes completely. This is not an old story, this is now.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Seattle? SF? Schools They are just suck but even adjacent functional districts don’t teach like that. The educational and conceptual math philosophy is simply different.
Variables are really interesting at elementary school age because they really flush out when a student doesn’t understand the concept and allows the teacher or parent to correct it early. Numbers sometimes mask what’s going on and let students take shortcuts that hurt them later
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.
In SF, school admins push "equality of outcomes" over "equality of opportunities" which was the basis for removing all gifted and differentiated learning programs. Finally, an achievable goal for school districts, which seems to prioritize fixing income disparity above any other goal, despite having no ability to make much difference since education is not a closed system. Those with means go to private schools or hire tutors, and the gap just worsens.
Keeping the "clever poors" in their place seems to be one thing the left and right agree on.
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.
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.
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.
>
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.
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.
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.
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.
I assume because they had not adopted the "dumb everything down to reduce variance in outcomes" educational ideology that has taken hold in most of the west over the past 50 years.
I tend to agree with your position.
But also, look at where almost all technological innovation has happened in the last 50 years
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 taking calculus?
I mean, I can totally see where the professors are coming from. We send them 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?
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.
>From my personal experience, people who are successful usually come from highly educated and/or wealthy families .. [from overseas]. FTFY
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.
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 think you mean it was the Soviet Union. Either you scored excellently and were sent to university or at least into engineering, to end up well-paid and comfortable in military research or you scored less than and worked on the fields ... Or were sent into war as cannon fodder.
Or to put it more generally: motivation.
Lagging indicator. Also private schools
>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.
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).
There’s certainly cultural reasons. If investors could make a buck off Pierre Zuckerbeurg, they certainly would.
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.
that's a bit too delulu... That's just your sampling bias. Of course a media predominantly feature contents in US English gives you impression that most things are happening in the US.
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.
> look at where almost all technological innovation has happened in the last 50 years
I take this to mean:
> 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.
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?
> 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.
And who made those innovations? Not a lot of Western born and raised people, I'm guessing.
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.
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?
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_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...
Well, it seems no different from the current GPU export controls
Those who are in power in Western countries only preach free markets if it serves to their advantage.
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
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.
The bottom 50 probably don’t benefit from math education anyway.
No, everyone benefit from higher education from pure production/productivity standpoint. Whether it contributes toward GDP and/or QoL are different issues.
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.
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.
If anything the Soviets were far more serious about education than their western peers and one of the reasons they become a world power so quickly.
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?
Interesting observation. Never noticed that.
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.
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
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.
False rigor is common among societies that are economically behind. Same reason poor schools mandate uniforms.
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.
Characterise false rigour? Do you mean something that purports to be rigour but is not?
> 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)
The article gives the response, doesn't it? The necessity of the math in military research made them so hardcore ...
Here in California, apparently algebra is "too hard" for 8th graders.. the tests scores look bad, so "algebra" is now a target of political action.. to remove it.
Seriously, public schools in California are proposing removing the advanced math classes completely. This is not an old story, this is now.
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.
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.
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
> they introduce variables in 2nd grade
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.
Seattle? SF? Schools They are just suck but even adjacent functional districts don’t teach like that. The educational and conceptual math philosophy is simply different. Variables are really interesting at elementary school age because they really flush out when a student doesn’t understand the concept and allows the teacher or parent to correct it early. Numbers sometimes mask what’s going on and let students take shortcuts that hurt them later
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.
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 agree your headline is two years old
It would have been less effort and more useful to provide a citation on your original comment, but you chose this.
In SF, school admins push "equality of outcomes" over "equality of opportunities" which was the basis for removing all gifted and differentiated learning programs. Finally, an achievable goal for school districts, which seems to prioritize fixing income disparity above any other goal, despite having no ability to make much difference since education is not a closed system. Those with means go to private schools or hire tutors, and the gap just worsens.
Keeping the "clever poors" in their place seems to be one thing the left and right agree on.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.