Why are Soviet math textbooks so hardcore in comparison to US textbooks? (2017)

mistrial9

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.

ezconnect

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.

tryauuum

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

RA_Fisher

False rigor is common among societies that are economically behind. Same reason poor schools mandate uniforms.

vintermann

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.

leonidasrup

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...

corysama

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.

vkgcr

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.

myth_drannon

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.

imeanwhatdoikno

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

rdtsc

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.

spwa4

The article gives the response, doesn't it? The necessity of the math in military research made them so hardcore ...

expedited123

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.

afolkest

To paraphrase my old Soviet physics professor: 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.

jcarrano

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.

jollyllama

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.

hackermailman

Bulgarian/USSR Math Circles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_circle and problems they work on are in this book https://bookstore.ams.org/mcl-25 Regular school you would solve problems in combinatorics, algebra and geometry together in class by offering small ideas or strategies then trying each one to point out what works and doesn't work. You do enough of these everyday in class then reasoning about abstract sets in analysis isn't a huge leap. Same reason we used to read Euclid in class and make students demonstrate countless proofs. CMU Discrete Math course has kind of the same techniques where he solves problems with the whole class https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0K540qqyJJU The best students then joined the school math circle with professional mathematicians and became TAs like in university helping their regular class. They tried and failed the soviet curriculum with New Math https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Math Singapore high school students learn the equivalent of AP Calculus in Grade 10 then either spend years 11/12 at a trade school or stay to earn an associates degree to prep for university covering engineering electives like linear algebra and differential equations.

hakunin

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.

dang

One past thread. Others? Why are Soviet math textbooks so hardcore in comparison to US textbooks? (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22941144 - April 2020 (661 comments)

magnio

FWIW, in my limited experience, this mostly holds for undergraduate level, and the gap is much closer for post-graduate textbooks. 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.