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.
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.
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.
If you care about this, I’d suggest rethinking how much it centers around labeling some children as “gifted” and asserting that they are intrinsically more deserving of higher quality educational opportunities than the other children who were born undeserving.
Really, the general public isn’t that interested in a program that says other children are more talented than their own children, and that their tax dollars should therefore give their own children a second-tier educational experience.
This is the land of opportunity. Why not just offer advanced coursework for all who could reasonably succeed and whose parents are willing to drive to the school every morning?
This is a good reason why public schools shouldn't exist or at least there should be freedom to choose which school your kid should go to. People should retain the tax for schools and deploy them as they see best for their kids.
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 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.
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
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.
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 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).
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.
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)
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.
Textbooks don’t need a lot of revisions though. Basic math has not really changed that much. One of my favorite textbooks I used as a kid was written ten years before I was born.
When I started Chemistry in college, Professor Zumdahl said to by a copy of the CRC Press Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. Whether it was new or used didn’t really matter - it’s not like Boltzmann’s constant is changing all that often.
When you get new textbooks. You still have the "new books every year or so" vs "we finally got hand-me-downs from our neighbor district after 10 years" divide.
I'd also push back against the idea that district wealth necessarily determines instructor quality. There's a lot that goes into surviving a wealthier area, and it isn't necessarily a matter of skill or experience. How well you navigate the interpersonal gamut also plays in (e.g., are you willing to compromise your ethics to keep happy the over-involved parents who care more about the grade than academic progress?).
I would tend to agree with this. A combination between low-info fluff and childish presentation. It feels like being bombarded with a technicolor fireworks display of obfuscation and mystification. Maybe it's the gimmick of "edutainment" and the goofy idea that you need to inject fanfare and folderol into education to appeal to students that created this mess.
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.
The undergrad books not so much. There are tons of colorful padding. Pages after pages that describe what the next set of pages will describe, advertisement for apps and websites. In fact good 10% of the pages/area seem like marketing copies.
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.
I had a minor experience with what sounds like this style of pedagogy in my high school physics and calculus courses. The lecture and grading styles effectively pitted students against one another. I suppose this works for confident and competitive students, particularly if you can get in the instructor's good graces, but I was merely curious and dealing with self-esteem issues (physical late/never bloomer) and stereotype threat. I continued excelling in my other classes and just switched off in those.
Without getting too into the weeds, I did a lot better in classes where the teacher was some category of "votes blue", identity-wise (race, gender, sexuality, even height).
Always interesting to revisit the idea of the theoretical role “education” plays in society. One might view the primary objective of school as a sorting machine or one that imparts knowledge for its own sake. These two things aren’t specifically mutually exclusive, but you can have only one “primary objective”.
Only having experience within the US myself, I have always found the idea of “forced ranking” for grades a little odd. Though admittedly, I do skew towards being (perhaps a bit too) idealistic in that sense.
> 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.
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.
This theory would make for an interesting study of cultural preferences of programming languages, static/dynamic, functional/object-oriented, post/pre/infix, etc.
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.
But does it really produce better outcomes? At the top? At the 50% percentile? For neither I find the answer obvious.
For the top talented "the west" has the approach to do individual focus, with focus classes and prodigies and all that. It may not hit everybody whom it should and may waste some potential here and there, but it's less scary too and I don't see that it's an obviously worse approach to this skill bracket. (Two data points from top of my head: Terence Tao and Magnus Carlsen, both widely regarded as absolute top in their field, grew up in "the west".)
For the average person, trying to make math approachable and following peoples instincts and interests could be helpful too. I know lots of folks "in the west" for whom even basic math goes over their heads, but I also have quite a few acquaintances from the soviet era who were beaten so hard with advanced math that nothing stuck and they have equal much trouble with very basic math. The conclusion isn't obvious either, to me.
It relates to whether the most competent mathematician is also the best suited person to teach. I'd argue, no. Deep competency in math is a requirement, sure. But so is a firm grasp on pedagogy. I've had my share of excellent math researchers as professors who were utterly incompetent when it came to teaching. Similar with text books.
You bring up some interesting points. I certainly think that you can go overboard in the other direction, like in South Korea, where I'm not sure the crazy intensity of their educational system is necessarily better.
I still think there would be benefits to making education in the west a bit harder, if for anything to build the taste for intellectual effort in young kids. But especially to identify talent who could not be identified otherwise.
It's interesting that you mentioned Tao and Carlsen. Would they have been identified by the educational system had Tao's mom not been a mathematician, and Carlsen's dad a chess enthusiast?
More controversially, assuming "normal" parents, would Carlsen and Tao have had more chance of being identified and pushed towards excellence had they been born in the USSR in the 1950s or in the west today?
I think the "growth mindset" is the core problem. In the end it rewards highly motivated idiots, who get praised in spite of failing, while the genius who solves the problem in 10s gets dismissed as "smart, but lazy".
It's not "to reduce variance in outcomes." It's "to increase the fraction of students who meet a minimum state standards bar," which is what the school districts and thus the schools are evaluated on. If the schools were evaluated on a metric that rewarded shifting the whole distribution instead of just getting the bottom performers up, we would see different educational priorities, and indeed, we see some of that already in school districts that don't have that many students that struggle to meet the minimum standards.
the truth is America has given up on "shifting the distribution" to the right.
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 America has given up on "shifting the distribution" to the right.
The truth is that most voters don't care about education. People who run for school boards don't do so with policy recommendations backed by research. They do so solely on backgrounds as mediators between teachers, parents, and administrators. Yes, people skills are needed for the job, but people skills are needed for any job. Making people happy is not the same as getting things done, and you need someone who can do both in any job you are hiring for.
> Its impossible to do so at the lower end, without massive redistribution.
Korea and China have shown that it is possible with the political will. Jaime Escalante has shown that even instilling only student will is sufficient.
The idea of national mappings of "IQ distributions" are mostly fictitious. Nobody has ever run even plausibly-powered surveys to establish such a thing. Most people reading this thread have never even been offered a proctored IQ test, let alone been requested to take one to help establish an American national IQ statistic.
From what I understand, a reliable "America vs. China" IQ comparison is mostly hopeless.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
they were not gangsters during the soviet times, so its hardly an argument about them as persons. But rather a sign of decaying times (the fall of the USSR and the economic hardship).
Remember when the US had a hurricane somewhere in the South (Kathrina?), people just went looting all retail stores, same as what happened during racial riots etc etc.
Of course soviet system had crime and violence. And these products of soviet system super blew up right after it fell, ceasing opportunity no matter who or what they harmed.
What is that supposed to mean in the context? Anyway:
> 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.
its kinda rich talking about Russian/Soviet crime in the 1990s, when in the US 1% of population is incarcerated (top-1 in the world), 19 mln have felony record, and 79 mln people or 1/3 of population have some sort of misdemeanor or past criminal record
This has more to do with institutionalized and modern day slave labor than inherent criminality. More like intentional criminalization and over-policing.
Of course there were gangsters in soviet times. Vory v zakone[0] in the 20s-30s, tsekhoviki[1] in the 60s-70s, with a brief period during and after WW2 where enough killed each other[2] not to be a major issue for a moment.
its kinda rich talking about Russian/Soviet crime in the 1990s, when in the US 1% of population is incarcerated (top-1 in the world), 19 mln have felony record, and 79 mln people or 1/3 of population have some sort of misdemeanor or past criminal record
Meanwhile in the west we're lead by the weakest who merely got good grades but never built a thing of their own. People who caved time and again for money and sold our infrastructure off undermining our own learning and growth as individuals and a collective
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
The problem with that approach is that it disconnects a student from the learning environment.
They now have different classmates they don't have a connection with, they enter the new class having as their identity "the person who failed the previous year", and they'll probably have to sit bored in the classes of other subjects they did pass.
It's almost guaranteed to result in lower engagement.
I'm not denying the opposite is also bad btw. Skipping works sometimes for subjects like history where you'll encounter different topics the next year, but math is impossible to advance without a foundation, and sciences depend on it.
The only good answer is probably breaking the factory-system for schools, where students of the same age are batches going through a pipeline. having students of different levels mixed together like in victorian schools, being able to advance per-subject, something like that.
> 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.
its already the case, in America student classes get reshuffled EVERY year. Plus kids change schools from elementary/middle/high/college. Every year your class is shuffled.
There wont be any impact on students, because every year every class is reshuffled slightly, and every 3-4 years you change school altogether
The problem is making someone repeat a grade destroys their social life leading to even worse grades later on when they give up on school. You get kids failing multiple times until they complete the mandatory education and then get kicked out without graduating, can't find a job and become criminals. It also takes away from the economy because you start working a year later.
I think there are two solutions. You can make students repeat only the failed class and take it with their normal classes next year like in college. Or a requirement based system where you can only graduate after passing every class on the plan but you can attempt them as many times as you want (even after you're out of school and working full time).
A graduate who can't read or do basic math isn't contributing much to society, and their social life likely isn't great anyway. It's likely better all around that they get forced into learning the basics than pushed along into things they have no chance of understanding.
your adult life and career will be ruined even worse if you cant grasp basic math.
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
> your adult life and career will be ruined even worse if you cant grasp basic math.
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.
There reason that diplomas (or grades) are economically valuable in the first place is that they perform a signaling function. They signal, however imperfectly, some measure of competency, discipline, and intelligence. Some diplomas also signal membership in a certain social class. Employers utilize those signals to make hiring decisions, which makes them valuable.
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. You 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.
So we’re more worried about a kid’s social line than education and future employability. Got it.
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.
Some kids/parents/guardians need a good swift kick in the ass to overcome their own inertia before they can make critical changes.
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.
> The problem is making someone repeat a grade destroys their social life leading to even worse grades later on
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's kind of what my a college physics professor from Korea told me (he emigrated to US in the 70s). They didn't have the all the fancy lab equipment but had paper and pencils so he got really good theoretical physics.
>The whole "maybe math is too hard and we should just make it optional or dumb it down" that I have seen in US was just not something acceptable or plausible as a policy in that system.
Growing up in Europe, while preparing for college access exams, my teacher recommended American textbooks for self study.
His reasoning was: "they have the smartest writers in the planet creating textbooks for the world's dumbest students".
It was a stereotypical joke, of course, but I think there was something to the thought. There's a great combination of STEM talent and a cultural expectation for not letting people behind. The latter probably sucks in classroom settings, when you're stuck at the lowest student's pace, but it works for self study material when you can freely skip and advance.
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.
At least this 1984 report on "Aspects of Soviet Secondary Education: School Performance and Teacher Accountability" https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/docum... claims that a more ambitious curriculum did not lead to more repeaters ("grade repeating has declined over the years"), but instead "most teachers have chosen the easier solution of adapting their grading practices to the results expected of them." The students who didn't get algebra were apparently filtered out later: "According to the few statistics available on entrance exam results, it seems that somewhere between 20 and 30% of all students fail tests in their chosen field of specialization."
>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.
In my personal experience, it's much less related to circumstantial opportunities. The ladder was derived from 19th century Germany (which was the model country for engineering and science back then) and more or less worked in practice in both Russian Empire and USSR. 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 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. (thankfully, I was lucky enough to grow up after the crash) It still works this way in many countries, actually.
There’s also the fact that a lot of people in the system simply don’t care. The state can demand whatever it wants and produce whichever program it wants, but despite what they want you to think, they still do not control everything even in the USSR or modern day Russia. I had the displeasure of being part of that system, so I have a lot of experience here. Most of the time, little Ivan will either simply be rolled into the next class in spite of any bad grades “to not ruin the stats”, or his parents will make a nice “voluntary” contribution to the school’s nonexistent budget and his bad grades will suddenly turn into good ones. From the inside, the difficulty looks a lot more like overcompensating for failures rather than setting a standard, because standards are often completely ignored for various reasons. People often cite Russia’s incredibly high literacy rate. Having lived there, think again who’s measuring those stats and to what standard.
There are huge regional and district-level differences between schools in the US. The quality and level of my kid's precalc class is on par or better than the one I had in Soviet high school. I am helping a friend's daughter with her math, and the difference between the quality of instruction is staggering.
> 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.
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-.
> They may have gone to better schools, with better teachers, or had parents who cared more etc.
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 think the book is seen more of as a complementary thing to the teacher, not something you're expected to read and understand on your own (unless you're really smart). They give you the cold hard theory, exercises with little explanation and wish you off after that.
I'm from Eastern Europe and studied a bit of math in undergrad and I referenced mostly from American books as everything else was just terrible to learn from. I even read a portion of Spivaks Calculus, which was difficult but great.
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.
I had a copy of "Differential and Integral Calculus" by Piskunov that belonged to my father. The prologue said it was used in the curricula of technical schools in the USSR. I used to think about that fact a lot and tried to imagine what those Soviet technical schools would be like. There was a lot of content there that I did not see in any of the seven math courses we had at uni.
One of my teachers said the only job for her was factory book keeper in some nasty factory. She came over to the US in the 90s and became a CPA then taught college level accounting.
She said a lot of people she immigrated with were overqualified for the jobs in Russia (factory book keeper or technician with PhD level knowledge). The same applied to the US but there were many more options than factory jobs. Her husband was on the technical track and found a job as a professor somewhere.
There was some emergent property of the communist countries, compared to the capitalist ones, that made them want to produce large numbers of highly educated professionals in specific fields, the Eastern bloc with engineers as well as Cuba with doctors. I suspect there are many factors but it should be considered that licensing boards prioritize career safety for existing professionals.
Cuba proliferates their doctors because they've massively contracted them out as exports to bring in foreign exchange money. Sometimes they donate care when it's politically expedient.
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.
The best students then joined the school math circle with professional mathematicians and became TAs like in university helping their regular class.
Singapore highschool students learn the equivalent of AP Calculus in Grade 10 then either spend years 11/12 at a tradeschool or stay to earn an associates degree to prep for university covering engineering electives like linear algebra and ODEs
>> Same reason we used to read Euclid in class and make students demonstrate countless proofs.
Key phrase: "Read Euclid". American schools do not read about math. They are taught to do math. They do not read anything written by the people who created it. They are not given context. They are given set problems and taught how to solve them using prescribed methods. More often than not, this results in lackluster understanding.
It's a common trope that because Soviets had few resources, they were forced to think more. Not sure how true it is.
On a slight tangent, I noticed a similar dynamic with debugging. Most people I meet prefer debugging by walking through the code line by line. I prefer to sit back and think where is a human likely to make a mistake, and then go there. For some reason this way finds bugs very quickly. That said, it's all moot now that LLMs.
My linear algebra teacher was this older mathematician from soviet, who had emigrated to the west in the early 90s. In some casual talks we had, the topic around school systems was brought up - and at least according to him, the old soviet system had a demanding common curriculum, but also one where exceptional students were easily identified and supported.
idk if he mentioned, but if you shown promise, you would've been moved to a second tier school, which were prep for top 5-7 universities, school exit exam there being harder than entry, and people in uni knowing those in those schools.. well. to end up in tops one only had to study hard.
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.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 49.3 ms ] threadSeriously, public schools in California are proposing removing the advanced math classes completely. This is not an old story, this is now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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?
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.
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 racial riots 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.
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/directlyimpacted2025.htm...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thief_in_law
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsekhovik
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitch_Wars
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/directlyimpacted2025.htm...
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
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. You 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.
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 19th century Germany (which was the model country for engineering and science back then) and more or less worked in practice in both Russian Empire and USSR. 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 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. (thankfully, I was lucky enough to grow up after the crash) It still works this way in many countries, actually.
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).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Kolmogorov
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 highschool students learn the equivalent of AP Calculus in Grade 10 then either spend years 11/12 at a tradeschool or stay to earn an associates degree to prep for university covering engineering electives like linear algebra and ODEs
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.
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.
Why are Soviet math textbooks so hardcore in comparison to US textbooks? (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22941144 - April 2020 (661 comments)
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.
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.