
Why are Soviet math textbooks so hardcore in comparison to US textbooks? (2017) - webdva
https://www.quora.com/Why-are-Soviet-mathematics-physics-textbooks-so-insanely-hardcore-in-comparison-to-US-textbooks/answer/Scott-Miller-307?share=1
======
lsh123
Disclaimer: I graduated from one of the top math high schools in Moscow in
early 90s, I have MS in Math from Moscow State University, and a half finished
PhD from the same place.

I think on average the difference between a high school student from Russia
and US is negligible. Either country doesn’t really require much to finish
school and many kids just do the tests without understanding what is going on.
What separates Soviet Union (and now Russian) system is the practice of
selecting kids with interest in mathematics / physics into special classes or
schools for gifted kids. This government program feeds the mathematics and
physics departments in the universities and allows kids who go through this
program to get a very early start in mathematics. This is very similar to
government sponsored sports programs with talented kids getting help with
summer camps, or even all year round training schools.

~~~
missosoup
> I think on average the difference between a high school student from Russia
> and US is negligible

I went to high school in Russia and then moved to Australia. The difference
was immense. It felt like i just dropped 2 year levels. Even the accelerated
programs were hopelessly behind the regular curriculum for my age group in
Russia. AU/US high school students can't possibly compete against RU or CN
high school students. The gap only begins closing around year 11/12, sometimes
not until tertiary education.

One of the major factors is this weird anti-intellectualism culture that just
doesn't exist in Russia. Doing well at your subjects in Russia put you in the
cool group. Doing well at your subjects in AU got you labelled as a nerd. This
permeates western culture across the board, hence domestically popular tv
shows like Big Bang Theory which have 0 audience in countries that value
intellect. I hear the culture of marginalising smart kids is somewhat changing
lately though.

The other factor is that westerners really love to coddle and infantalise
their children. A 12 year old in Russia is basically treated as a small adult
with the associated respect and responsibilities. A 12 year old here is
treated (and behaves) like a large baby.

~~~
gambiting
Not the same, but I went from the Polish education system to a British
university, and it also felt like it was a massive downgrade.

What really surprised me was the core principle at British unversities -
"don't assume prior knowledge of anything". It basically meant that on a CS
course, they teach you basic level maths, basic programming skills, you spend
the entire 1st year of university learning what we learnt in school around age
15-16. A Polish university absolutely won't be teaching you basic
algebra,statistics or core concepts of programing on a CS course - you are
simply required to know these things, otherwise wtf are you doing on a CS
course.

Also in general, I find the elective system of subjects in British schools to
be.....poor. As in, I was(and am) surrounded by perfectly normal adults who
are good in certain subjects(the ones they picked) and who have zero knowledge
in others(the ones they didn't pick). I feel like my own Polish education has
given me a very broad understanding of a lot of different subjects even if I
wasn't personally interested in them. Like, even though I went to a school
with a "maths and CS focus"(which just meant these two subjects had 2x the
number of lessons each week), we still had lessons in history, physics,
chemistry, biology, Polish literature.....all of it was mandatory, you
couldn't just decide to skip it. At the time, I thought it was useless, but in
hindsight I am very grateful for it because it has given me at least basic
level of knowledge in many different subjects, whereas my British peers just
can't even have a conversation about basic chemistry for instance, since they
never took it as a subject.

~~~
sefrost
> What really surprised me was the core principle at British unversities -
> "don't assume prior knowledge of anything".

My experience was that even if all of the students prior to university studied
maths A-Levels, we all studied different topics. Before those two year
A-Levels, we all studied different topics in GCSEs. There is so much time
wasted giving everyone the same knowledge because of how our system is set up
with different exam boards.

I don't know if this is the case in other countries.

~~~
jojobas
You don't get to choose different maths A-levels in Russia. There is one state
standard that every school and every student has to stick to. You can have
accelerated or deeper "special schools" but you can't evade the state standard
on maths or you won't get you high school diploma.

~~~
Symbiote
There is a state standard in England and Wales (and another standard in
Scotland). It's called the National Curriculum, although I'm not sure if it
has a different name for A-levels.

There are multiple implementations of that standard, in the form of exams that
meet the standards. The government checks the exams satisfy their standards.

For example, an exam on history might by on the 20th century Britain, and a
different one might use 19th century Europe.

~~~
jojobas
Again, the Russian standard doesn't give you choices. Everyone has to know
logarithms, derivatives and certain chapters of history.

The advanced maths selective school will hammer you with more complicated
geometry problems, and some contents of the first few uni courses.

~~~
Symbiote
Everyone in England also has to know logarithms and derivatives. There's much
less flexibility for maths.

For history, the government requires that they:

• develop and extend their knowledge and understanding of specified key
events, periods and societies in local, British, and wider world history; and
of the wide diversity of human experience

• engage in historical enquiry to develop as independent learners and as
critical and reflective thinkers

• develop the ability to ask relevant questions about the past, to investigate
issues critically and to make valid historical claims by using a range of
sources in their historical context

• develop an awareness of why people, events and developments have been
accorded historical significance and how and why different interpretations
have been constructed about them

• organise and communicate their historical knowledge and understanding in
different ways and reach substantiated conclusions

The topics should be:

• from three eras: Medieval (500-1500), Early Modern (1450-1750) and Modern
(1700-present day)

• on three time scales: short (depth study), medium (period study) and long
(thematic study)

• on three geographical contexts: a locality (the historic environment);
British; and European and / or wider world settings

and "British history must form a minimum of 40% of the assessed content over
the full course."

Beyond that, it's up to the people making the exams.

I think this is great -- everyone should learn the techniques ("to investigate
issues critically" etc) but the school, teacher and student have some
flexibility in their learning. At university or in life, it hardly matters
whether I focussed on Roman Britain or European WWII history to achieve this.

[https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...](https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/310549/history_GCSE_formatted.pdf)

------
c-smile
I was comparing my math books (from Soviet university, Physics and Applied
Math) and my son's from Canadian university (CS).

Huge difference to be honest. Canadian ones (same as in US I think) were more
like belletristic texts written with the goal to give basics without too much
thought needed by the reader.

In contrast you cannot approach Soviet text math book without serious thinking
effort. You need to overcome some mental barrier to get into. If you cannot do
that then this is not yours - choose something else.

I believe that is because of different motivations of high-school systems.
University on the West gets its money directly from students so they motivated
to attract and keep as many students as possible - so books are entry level to
do not scare students. Barrier here is established from "paying user" side.

In USSR universities were getting money from state/society as education was
free so they must maintain those barriers so only those who went through were
there. Barrier here is from "service provider" side.

~~~
Endlessly
Read, then reread, and still do not understand your point.

Are you saying that in Russia, since the education was free that the goal of
the textbooks was to make it hard to want to stay in school, if so, to me,
seems like it’s unlikely, but possible.

Putting aside non-Russian textbooks, what are you saying the intended
reasoning of the textbook form was as it relates to Russian culture?

~~~
pandaman
I don't think the books were made hard intentionally.

From what I understand, in the US, the same course on, say, Introduction to
Calculus, can be attended by people who are learning to be MDs, chemical
engineers, accountants and mathematicians because there is no fixed curriculum
and everyone can pick up that course. So the textbooks and courses need to be
as accessible as possible to accommodate a wide range of aptitudes.

In Russia/USSR, at least till 90s (don't know if it's still true since there
had been a movement to "westernize" education) you enrolled into a major, not
a school, and the whole class had the same curriculum for the first two years
with some specialization starting on the third year (the whole program is 5-6
years). So students with the same major go to the same courses, which are not
shared with any other majors. In this system Introduction to Calculus for
mathematicians will be very different from the course with the same name for
sociologists and does not have to be as accessible for people who do not
really care about strictness of proofs, structure and other "mathy" stuff.

~~~
disiplus
it's/was the same in ex yugoslavia countries.

------
geomark
Here is an interesting paper [1](PDF) by a Russian mathematician who has
taught mathematics in Russia, USA and Brazil. He compares the "very successful
usage of word problems in Russia and contradictory, inefficient and often
immature treatment of word problems in USA."

[1] [http://toomandre.com/travel/sweden05/WP-SWEDEN-
NEW.pdf](http://toomandre.com/travel/sweden05/WP-SWEDEN-NEW.pdf)

~~~
bo1024
Wow, this is a great read! I'm on page 18 so far. It's been discussing how
"word problems" are key to developing critical thinking skills, and how far
behind the US seems to be in them. One point made: the idea that word problems
can wait till algebra, which gives a universal method for solution, totally
misses that they develop logic skills and practice with problem solving, which
makes learning algebra so much easier.

~~~
koheripbal
This isn't the case anymore. US Common Core Math lessons use word problems
from the first grade onward.

------
agumonkey
I can only assume but culture makes things very different. I often said that
French abstract algebra books stopped me from learning for 10 years (after
many serious attempts). One book from Garreth Williams unlocked 80% of my
issues. The shocking part was the approach. It was very operational, you
calculate, you manipulate concrete data. In French books it's all theorems and
concepts. Learning curve to make a Haskeller faint. And that book is not the
only instance, Gilbert Strang lectures on youtube are also similar in style.
It also correlates with the pragmatic engineering of US history (electricity
comes to mind).

~~~
julianeon
I feel like it's worth pointing out here, for Americans who don't know better
(no blame implied), that the French have one of the best mathematical
pipelines in the world. They have almost as many Nobels (13 vs. 11) despite
having 1/5 the population. Guardian article about them here:

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/may/31/europa-
french-...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/may/31/europa-french-maths-
ecoles-normales-superieures)

So please don't think France is a backwater that just doesn't know how to do
math - on the contrary, it may be the best country in the world to be born
into, if you want to be a mathematician.

For what it's worth, I'm an American who honestly is pretty bad at math, but I
try to keep learning, though I'm past an age where it will matter in college
or higher education.

~~~
realbarack
A paraphrased anecdote I heard about French math education:

"In America, they start by teaching you how to add two numbers, then once
you've mastered that you learn to subtract, then once you've got that down you
learn to multiply and divide and so forth. In France they tell you: this is an
arithmetic object. The operations on it are add, subtract, multiply, and
divide. It's simple!

It's a good way of cranking out a bunch of Fields medalists, while everyone
else has no idea what's going on."

~~~
Koshkin
_To the question "what is 2 + 3" a French primary school pupil replied: "3 +
2, since addition is commutative". He did not know what the sum was equal to
and could not even understand what he was asked about!_

[https://www.uni-muenster.de/Physik.TP/~munsteg/arnold.html](https://www.uni-
muenster.de/Physik.TP/~munsteg/arnold.html)

~~~
agumonkey
To be honest, what he's criticizing is also what is lacking in post-primary
school math education. The mechanical reduction (3 + 2 -> 5) leads to a road
block when you start thinking into solving equations.. because there's no
single path of reduction. You need to see the formulas as material you can
transform in your mind.

------
starik36
Personal experience. In USSR till 16, then 11th and 12th grade in US. Yes, the
books and the curriculum were way harder in the Soviet Union, but it's largely
pointless.

In USSR, there were 2-3 kids in the entire class who actually vaguely
understood the material and the other 28 were just copying their homework.

In a US high school, by contrast, you can choose to take whatever level of
math you are able to grok (AP, College Prep, etc...)

Given the average results, I vastly prefer the US system. USSR system was a
one size fits all that didn't work well for the average pupil.

~~~
TheTrotters
Underrated point. In Poland grades often don’t matter at all (e.g. for
university admission). Cheating is widespread in school (but not at final
exams after high school). Meanwhile in US your high school grades matter for
university admission etc.

And, yes, it is often possible for students to complete these harder classes
without much to show for it.

------
PeterStuer
We had a very famous MIT professor on a 6 month sabbatical at our lab in the
early 90's. He remarked on the difference between US and our institution in
Belgium being that here you can just assume undergrad students would be fluent
in basic math subjects, whereas in the US (in this case MIT) you would have to
explain even very basic math.

Now 3 decades later we are also at a US level as math has in general been
completely de-emphasized at all levels of education.

As for textbooks, at the time EU ones were pretty clean, mostly definitions,
axioms, proofs and conjectures, plots etc, layed out in simple black on white,
whereas US textbooks were extremely wordy, full of colour and irrelevant
photos blasting away at your senses.

Sadly this seems to be the style that commercially won, but I doubt very much
it is beneficial to the student.

~~~
ausbah
I don't think just plopping all the subject material in front of a student and
expecting everyone to immediately "get it". Some people may have the intuition
to read a group of definitions or a proof and suddenly understand the higher
level concepts gluing everything together, but that certainly doesn't work for
everyone.

Anecdotally, having a textbook that explains a concept via examples without
jargon and informative pictures, _then_ throwing all the definitions and
proofs at me has been much more helpful to my understanding in multiple
subject areas.

I'd also throw "extremely wordy passages" in there as well because having
something repeated & reframed multiple times has help me understand something
from multiple perspectives - and remind me of a previous definition at a
crucial point in the text.

------
MisterTea
I have a feeling that TV/media really did play a huge role in the decline of
intellectualism in the western world. The USA loves its TV, hollywood and
celebrities. It's been reinforced throughout the culture and it makes a lot of
people very very wealthy. The more time you spend watching tv the more money
they make. Though here's the crux for them, educated people think more and do
more so they don't make good customers. So fill the TV with anti
intellectualism. Then toss it the political usefulness of a mindless medium
and you have a dangerous conduit so to speak.

A friend grew up in a household where his mother forbade TV and video games.
During this covid-19 lockdown, instead of mindlessly watching TV like everyone
else appears to be doing, he built a deck and is rebuilding his garage among
other projects. Every other friend I talk to is sitting around drunk, high or
watching TV. Few do some projects but it's mostly TV show chatter in the chat
apps.

Personally I don't hate TV and I have netflix. Though I only really watch it
in spates and when it is on, I am on my laptop or doodling in my notebooks.
It's more for background noise than content. Though of course there are some
times when I'm tired and just want to sit and watch an episode of a show.

~~~
Shivetya
Politics played a bigger role. Simply put they had to aim for lowest common
denominator when setting standards else claims of discrimination would pile
on.

Many school systems went so far as to either modify grading systems to prevent
embarrassment or celebration of achievement. Schools types which attempt to
provide a more specialized learn curriculum are regularly demonized for one
reason or another.

If you want the best education then the word fairness needs to be applied
properly. Fairness is insuring all students are offered the opportunity to
learn and receive an education while accepting there are many who can learn
more and should be offered the opportunity to do so even if that includes
elevating them among their peers.

Educational achievement should be held in higher esteem that sports yet for
some odd reason we do not consider fairness is sports an issue where some kids
cannot compete because of ability yet in learning we do.

~~~
MisterTea
Schooling has indeed been dumbed down but that as happened in the more recent
decades. TV/media manipulation has been at work slowly getting our
intellectual capacity for decades, since WW2. I even will go as far as to say
it was a direct result of WW2. Cant have kids growing up to be commies. Best
have little Susie and Joey sit and watch wholesome american tv reinforcing
traditional american values of imperialism, idealism, consumerism and
obedience to authority.

------
dirtnugget
I had an exchange year during High School where I moved from Germany to
Florida for a year and attended a public school. I hate to say this but to me
the classes were laughably easy. While I was a 10th grader in Germany I could
have easily graduated there.

I do however favour the US system of individual classes where you could
advance in e.g. Mathematics but if you had trouble with language you could
take a less-intensive course.

This doesn't work in Germany. You either advance with all subjects at once or
you don't. One of the most stupid things that I have witnessed. In our
11th/12th grade we would have a huge difference between grades. About 20% of
people were getting straight A's while over a third struggled to even pass.
Barely anyone in the mid-range. Terrible system which makes it really really
hard for teachers to teach a class.

~~~
ThreeFx
You have a form of in Germany that in most of the states with the
"Leistungskurse" or the "Profilklassen".

I'd argue that its extremely important to _not_ be able to drop courses since
it contributes to a well-rounded education, something the US sorely lacks.

~~~
dirtnugget
Yeah but this system is taking a huge toll on the teachers. Our maths teacher
had to basically give two different courses within one class, because the gap
was so big.

------
rdiddly
I mean, could it be as simple as "Learning math is more important to Russians
than to Americans?" And before you dismiss this as simplistic, consider
everything that's competing for attention with "learning math." What things
are Americans either preoccupied with or beset with, that Russians esp. Soviet
Russians, weren't? I'm thinking, the profit motive. Particularly as concerns
textbook publishers. And parents who need to pay for healthcare and that
oversized house. And textbook readers who wonder how the hell they'll ever use
this to find a job.

~~~
p1esk
No, learning math was never more important to an average Russian than it was
to an average American. An average Russian has never knew math any better than
an average American.

Source: attended school in both countries.

~~~
throw1234651234
Are you in your early, early 20s? Because the Russian education system fell
apart recently. Bribes and teachers moving to Europe and all that.

~~~
to1y
I'm 28. We emigrated to Australia(from Russia) when I was in approximately
grade 3-4. I basically did no mathematical study for 4-5 years, the system was
that far ahead. From family in Russia I hear that ridiculous amounts of
homework(2hrs daily if you're on top of everything) is still a thing for young
children although there's all sorts of strange pro-putin insertions in the
curriculum but ultimately I don't know, it seems like Russia as a whole has
very quickly lost the few positives the Soviet Union brought. I felt the
quality of teaching was much better aswell. It seemed like many Australian
teachers did not fully grasp many of the concepts themselves. From what I
understand the American curriculum is even more relaxed so I'm not entirely
sure where the above commenter gets their information from or if they're being
entirely honest.

~~~
p1esk
_I 'm not entirely sure where the above commenter gets their information from
or if they're being entirely honest_

You left Russia when you were 10, so you were basically a child. Then you
"heard from family" something you've never actually experienced. On the other
hand, I was there in Soviet Union/Russia going through all 10 grades in three
different schools, and then getting my masters in engineering, while tutoring
high school students in math to make some cash. Then I tutored undergrads as a
TA here in US while getting my phd.

You have very little actual experience of Russian education, and zero
experience of American education, and you're questioning my honesty?

~~~
throw1234651234
I think we are just saying that you had an uncommon experience. Were you in a
small town by any chance?

Also, going back to the parent's post: "it seems like Russia as a whole has
very quickly lost the few positives the Soviet Union brought"

Right, kind of tragic.

~~~
p1esk
_Were you in a small town by any chance_

Average town (0.5M), average family (engineers), average school (not the best,
not the worst), though the high school I attended had math specialization, so
by the end of it I knew more math than an average Russian (or an average
American).

 _it seems like Russia as a whole has very quickly lost the few positives the
Soviet Union brought_

Now imagine North Korea collapses, becomes like South Korea 30 years later,
and someone makes a statement like that about it. Puts it in a different
light, doesn't it?

------
inglor
We have lots of Soviet teachers in Israel, they always said "it's better to
solve something in 15 ways than solve 15 things the same way" and that
resonated.

To be fair though, that approach is omnipresent in the math faculty in the
Hebrew University - so it was not unique to the Soviet paradigm but it was
interesting to see it in High School.

There is also a genuine sense of "let's try to do this!" that's very common in
computer science but is more common in "soviet" math than "regular Israeli"
math.

The most important distinction IMO was that these teachers were not _afraid_
of Math and could discuss higher level non-high-school concepts typically.
Having a teacher that loves the subject is important.

------
totorovirus
In my high school year in international school(in germany) I've seen many
students from diverse backgrounds. I could see balanced number of students
taught from their own origin: US, asian or international school itself.

One thing I remember until now is that students from US kept using the phrase
'plug-it-in' whenever they substitute values into quadratic formula. Overusing
that term made me laugh about their attitude towards math because it felt as
if they didn't really care what's inside that magic formula that pops the
answer out.

It felt so 'american' because I felt the same attitude when they treat
computer programs:

'I don't give a shit about what's going on. Some smart asian kid will make me
a magic machine that I just need to plug in the numbers and prints the answer,
while I focus on making varsity football team next year.'

You can downvote me for my racism though. All excuse I can make is that they
also laughed when I told them how their attitude towards math sounded like.

~~~
zozbot234
"Plug-it-in" is simply jargon for what would more properly be called
substitution and reduction. One would use the exact same sort of reasoning
when doing "proper" math proofs, so I think your attitude might be a bit
misguided - there's no "magic" involved.

~~~
totorovirus
yes but I've already seen the attitude among american students who treat plug-
it-in equivalent to plug-in devices xD

------
tarun_anand
This is a question close to my heart.

I was a huge fan of Russian Math and Science books and I used them to study
for an entrance exam to IIT (its more difficult to get into IIT than Harvard)
and came out in top 100 in the country.

But, inspite of coming out at the top of the exam, I found Russian maths books
very interesting and sometimes very difficult to master.

This coming from a country full of brilliant mathematicians. Russian math
books are not only hardcore compared to US - they are hardcore compared to
India also!!

One particular example is V. A. Krechmar.

[https://www.amazon.in/Problem-Book-Algebra-V-
Krechmar/dp/935...](https://www.amazon.in/Problem-Book-Algebra-V-
Krechmar/dp/9351448320)

If you consider yourself good in maths, try solving the problems from this
book!

There is simply no comparison of Soviet Math Books with the rest of the world.
US is so far behind that this comparison is not apt. The closest is Indian
Math books or books from Cambridge like S. L. Loney.

~~~
ken47
"its more difficult to get into IIT than Harvard"

By what metric? I doubt that everyone who got into IIT could get into Harvard.

But I may be a bit biased because I work with some IIT graduates who are a bit
underwhelming relative to the reputation of their alma mater.

~~~
govg
It's a hard comparison since Harvard and the IITs have different admission
processes. Admissions to the IITs happen via a single exam, which is held at
the end of 12 years of school education and is conducted over a few hours
consisting of upper level physics, chemistry and mathematics. Harvard
meanwhile has a lot more in terms of admission criteria, with essays, SAT
scores and other things taken into consideration.

The easiest way to justify OPs stance is to compare the admitted / applied
ratio for both schools, owing to the sheer number of people taking the IITJEE
and the relatively low number of seats available (around 10k), the success
ratio is lower than Harvard.

~~~
ken47
I agree - that could be the closest to a sound argument, but it's a very
superficial one. Someone who claims to be highly intelligent by virtue of
their alma mater should know better than to advance such an argument to an
educated audience.

~~~
zeroxfe
OP was not saying anything about intelligence or claiming to be highly
intelligent. It was a personal (and very interesting, IMO) anecdote on their
experience with math text books.

~~~
ken47
I take no issue with his anecdote.

He said that getting into IIT was more difficult than getting into Harvard,
which is a pretty clear claim about the intelligence of an IIT student, and by
extension, his intelligence.

The IIT graduates I've met are generally quite smart, but I've also noticed
occasional arrogance which can lead them to think, say, and do irrational
things, such as implying the superiority of IIT to Harvard, e.g. comparing
apples to oranges.

------
wenc
The linked article points to the fact that because the Soviets were resource-
constrained, theory was more accessible than equipment which drove the
education system to favor theoretical training.

I wonder if there's a trade-off to this. On one hand you produce some really
elite theoretical minds (Pontryagin, Lyapunov, Kolmogorov, etc.). But the
counterfactual is that it excludes those with high IQ but are more
practically-oriented as well as late-bloomers who didn't take to math early
but would have become reasonable applied mathematicians (I belong to this
category). I guess we will never know.

To draw a parallel, one of the criticisms of the French system -- where
mathematics is treated as the most important arbiter of intelligence (for
grandes ecoles admissions) -- is that other aptitudes are almost seen as
secondary. It optimizes too much for a very narrow aptitude -- which is great
for producing Fields Medalists, but underoptimizes for talent elsewhere.

In my experience, while the American education system on the other hand is
kind of a piece of cake from K-12, it somehow manages to catch up at the
college level (more or less). At the graduate level, the differences in
ability between a U.S. graduate student and a Soviet-system/Eastern European
educated one is largely diminished. And it does this without over-optimizing
for any particular aptitude so deep expertise is developed over a broader
field in the U.S.

~~~
elteto
> The linked article points to the fact that because the Soviets were
> resource-constrained, theory was more accessible than equipment which drove
> the education system to favor theoretical training.

Yes, indeed. Most people don't realize that the soviets were awful at product
engineering. Their consumer-oriented products (TVs, radios, cars) were pretty
terrible when compared to their western counterparts. My pet theory is that
this was, in part, due to the over-emphasis in theoretical approaches instead
of practical applications (that plus the lack of resources and the communist
ethos against consumerism).

~~~
atrettel
I'm reminded of the engineer's triangle here: "Good, fast, cheap. Pick two."
The problem with a lot of Soviet design was that they always had to pick cheap
since there were often shortages of resources. Their designs were
fundamentally influenced by scarcity, and it makes it difficult to make
anything good, especially if you need something quickly. That doesn't excuse
the fact that many designs were knockoffs and terrible in their own right, but
it does explain their underlying design choices.

There's an interesting book titled "Made in Russia: Unsung Icons of Soviet
Design" that details many examples of this. The one example that always struck
me was the Soviet soda machines. They could not waste previous metal on soda
cans, so the soda machines came with a communal cup. You put coins in the
machine for soda, and it filled the communal cup like a fountain drink. But
once you were done drinking you had to return the cup to the machine and press
a button to clean it out and make it ready for the next customer. This process
seems ghastly and ridiculous but makes sense when resources are scarce. It was
the design tradeoff the Soviets made so that soda machines would be available
in the first place.

~~~
Koshkin
> _They could not waste precious metal on soda cans_

I have read somewhere that metal in Soviet Union was pretty cheap...

------
dzhiurgis
I'm from Lithuania.

My dad had present from our relatives in Canada - basketball shoes (eventually
stolen) and a calculator. That calculator pulled a lot of favours over time,
he was the only one in town to have one. Dad couldn't believe you could just
order anything from catalogue in 70s. Anything the world, you can buy. Such a
unreal concept. He also got Beatles LP from somewhere (eventually confiscated
from teachers).

It's a good point the access to many basics weren't there. I've finished high
school in 2006, got my first PC in 1998. Very quickly I've learned to solve
math problems using graphing calculator apps. Cheated my German classes by
translating from German to English using Babelfish then to Lithuanian.

The only other time I ever had to do derivatives and integrals was math class
at university... while studying for management degree!

------
radkapital
This website contains contains links to lot of these textbooks -
[https://mirtitles.org](https://mirtitles.org)

~~~
webdva
Thanks.

------
INTPenis
I'm a Swede who returned to their native Croatia in the late 90s and early
2000s and found that kids were learning maths on a much more advanced level
than we were in Sweden.

I've throughout my life learned that this goes for most of eastern europe. I
can't explain why. If it's a more demanding education or if they have some
sort of genetic/environmental predisposition for maths.

But the phenomenon has been pretty consistent in my experience with people
from Romania, Bulgaria, Russia, Ukraine and the balkans.

One memory that stuck with me was how the village children would come back
from their last day at school, beginning of summer, and show off their report
cards.

Dozens of happy kids walking along a dirt road with their report cards in
hand, ready to show them off to any adult that might give them a few Kuna or
candy for the effort.

I was shocked, having been raised in Sweden.

------
downerending
In a US college in the 80s, the math professors definitely seemed to be in awe
of the Russians when it came to this stuff. And though I was in the US, early
on I was in an utter hardware wasteland, and I do think that not having much
hardware access improved my ability to just sit and think about things with
pencil and paper.

~~~
jschwartzi
Similarly, working on products with no debugger and a single LED for a UI
meant that I had to reason very carefully about how the code I wrote worked.
If I made a mistake there would be no feedback other than the behavior of the
product.

~~~
madengr
Funny, that’s how I presently program microcontrollers.

------
penetrarthur
I was taught in university by soviet professors and had to study soviet
textbooks and from what I can tell, Soviet textbooks are extremely steep and
unfriendly. There is not a single odd word and it even feels like they had to
save the paper. Text is often describing schemes that are 5-10 pages before.
It takes significantly more concentration to understand the whole thing. It
feels like authors used to compete in the precision of information rather than
making it more available for someone who is going to read it.

On the other hand, books from USA tend to be more friendly and will first
explain the basic intuition and only then dig deeper if necessary.

------
5revive
speaking from personal experience, the math I learned up to grade 4 in the
Soviet Union was enough to glide through all of American high school math. And
I wasn't in any way an advanced math student in the USSR. And I dont seem to
recall any extensive, South Korean style homework.

~~~
freepor
You are probably really gifted. I don't think this is a typical experience,
that a fourth grader in any country who doesn't do much homework knows most of
US high school math.

~~~
5revive
In my Soviet school, we went up to Grade 10 US high school math and I have a
clear memory when my old knowledge stopped and I had to actually learn. Up to
that point it really did feel like just redoing old classes again.

------
nafey
This a gem of a line:

"Coding up a simulation and having a computer torture it until it confessed
the results you wanted certainly takes talent, but it is arguably a different
kind of talent than thinking deeply about the problem itself."

------
rpiguy
The classic answer to this question is that "math was cheap."

The Soviet Union was comparatively poor to the United States, so you create
advantages where you can for the least investment. Math and national security
are closely linked, aerodynamics, radio communication/RADAR, encryptions, etc.
investment in rigor payed them dividends.

------
nine_zeros
My wife’s 12 yr old niece lives in India. Every time I see her, she’s studying
all day.

I happened to look at her math books. They had hundreds or thousands of word
problems in one year’s cheap textbook. And she had solved ALL of them TWICE
over within 8 months. It was unbelievable.

I haven’t seen anything quite like this in America.

------
econcon
Well I went to IIT and our education system is more like Soviet Style
education, heck we used the same books for competition prep.

I aced every class always stood first in my class till class 10th and after
that my performance dropped till I realized that "I am not supposed to care
about understanding a concept in its entirety and solve problem based on only
things I've learned however limiting it was". It was first unsettling to me
because in earlier classes I always went into depth and tried building my
understanding of a subject from ground up but in class 11th, there was no time
for all that. I did what everyone does, I basically figured out how to solve
problems based on pattern recognition, this literally required no
understanding or even how things for together but remembering few rules and
forumla and their order, and there you go - I cleared IIT just like that, no
coaching or help required.

This literally killed all my love for subjects and it became a "game" to solve
problems and acquire points. So I stopped bothering with deeper understanding
all together and began having life as in hanging out with friends and
girlfriend and only coming back to study when I am in mood to game the system
again.

I never enjoyed this kind of labor, slow placed exploration made bigger impact
on my mind and I've forgotten most of the things I learned in competition
mode.

Thing is those students who feel like they can't build concepts in air without
solid roots, they are going to suffer in Soviet Style education.

~~~
alimw
I'm not sure this is specific to any particular school of mathematical
education. There is bound to come a point at which you cannot understand
everything and have to start winging it. If you can cope with that, that's
good, you are prepared psychologically for research mathematics. And just
having learned the patterns will hold you in good stead. But if (as I did) you
find the whole thing an insult to your pride then you are only preparing
yourself for failure.

~~~
govg
India (and a few other places) face this issue to a larger extent, I feel.
When the judgement of your education comes via one single competitive exam,
you tend to maximize that reward. In the Indian education system (and to
similar extent afaik in china, south Korea and Japan), having nationwide tests
that are the only factor for university admissions in math and science forces
everyone competing to solve for performance in the exam. And it is far easier
to do this by learning how to solve problems than by learning the material
then using that knowledge to solve problems.

------
peter_d_sherman
Excerpt:

"At the risk of oversimplifying, I noticed that because of the traditional
scarcity of equipment, Russian students and scientists had to

 _think_

rather than experiment, whether with computers or accelerators; it was often
all that was available to them."

~~~
sndean
> traditional scarcity of equipment

This sort of thing likely led to what one of my Russian professors was pretty
proud of: That Soviet microbiologists with some bacteria, a pH meter, and some
basic chemicals like sodium citrate could bang out publications, with some
well-designed and elegant experiments. We Americans, on the other hand, would
spend thousands of dollars on fancy machines, reagents, etc. and were less
productive.

~~~
ausbah
constraints breed creativity!

------
seibelj
Soviet body builders only used free weights and a pull-up bar. You don’t need
anything but that to get big muscles. Similarly, you don’t need anything
except a chalk board to teach math and most other subjects.

~~~
partiallypro
But you do need a computer to teach programming (generally.) The US has
generally been about efficiency, there isn't much need wasting time on paper
with a problem when we can understand the concept and solve the problem with a
computer. That's my opinion of course, as an American. So I'm biased. When I
was taking advanced math classes, my first thought when presented a concept
was "how can I solve this by writing a calculator program to do it for me."
Maybe that isn't common, I don't know, but while it might not be what everyone
does...I think that is the American thinking on learning things.

~~~
rimliu
I actually am very glad that we did not have computers in my school at the end
of the 80ies. This was in Lithuania, then a part of the USSR. We had
programming classes, so without the computers we were taught the basic
concepts: variables, assignment, conditions, loops. Just concepts in a
pseudolanguage. Later, when I had access to the computers learning the
languages boiled down to "what's the syntax for this concept?" And then
writing my programs with a pen and paper because I had no computer at home for
a few more years.

Now I sometimes shake my head when I see comments like "I do not know
programming, which language (or worse—fraamework) should I learn?" It is so
tempting to say "duh, learn programming and worry about the languages later".

------
mygo
Is following along and learning / practicing math directly from a textbook
still the most effective way to learn math?

Now that we have devices in our pockets and on our desktops with more and more
capabilities that have educational use cases such as interactivity and AR, how
would a calculus lesson be made in 2020? Could we just go down the street, aim
our devices at cars passing by, or cars speeding up from a stop sign, and see
how speed, acceleration, and position relate to each other in real-time? Or
aim it at a pool table, bounce a cue ball off another ball and see how vector
summation can work in real life? Or input the weight of a cue ball, the type
of surface (felt?) and then see how the applied force can be estimated based
on how fast the cue ball moves when you hit it? Interactive bits like this as
examples and practice mixed in with the text?

~~~
saagarjha
I think that's a great way to get an intuitive understanding of the concepts,
as an introduction to the subject, but at some point you really do have to sit
down with numbers and equations and learn the theory behind it all and apply
it to examples that aren't constrained by the reality you can physically
experience in a classroom.

~~~
mygo
You would certainly have to sit down with numbers and equations, but that
still doesn’t automatically imply that a textbook is the best way. You can
derive numbers and equations via an app for example.

My question is this: if you always had the textbook’s author, who is an expert
instructor with decades of teaching experience _instantly_ available, in
person, whenever you want a lesson or to be reminded of an equation or want to
learn more about a subject, at no harm to him and his well-being: under which
situations would you opt for the textbook?

To me it feels like a textbook is one way to store and transfer and spread
knowledge, but is it automatically the best way to ever do so? Or is the
textbook simply one technology, and we are still searching for the best way to
teach as many people as possible with the resources and technologies at our
disposal?

------
qaq
It's not just textbooks. The whole approach was different. You would be
regularly called upon in class to do a problem on the blackboard. You would be
graded on the spot publicly. There was no participation trophy type stuff.
Teacher could easily make fun of you for not knowing something etc.

~~~
b3kart
Sounds like a recipe for producing a handful of brilliant scientists and a
generation of traumatised students.

~~~
qaq
Could be or might be just people with better adaptation to tough env. Someone
needs to do a study on this :)

------
gnrlbzik
When I moved to Canada in 98 from Belarus, I had minimal language knowledge. I
was also half way through school year. After my testing was done I was put in
to next grade.

Even though I was not the best student in my home country, prolly mediocre at
best. With some subjects being better than others, still it was surprising to
me.

By next school year I also felt that science classes were way behind what I
was used to, and even though I could only read and barely understood
instructions, I still was able to do very well in all of my stem classes
despite lack of language knowledge. Honestly it was kind of annoying that I
had to do things that I already have done in previous grades.

As I have started getting better with English and started paying less
attention in class and less to my homework, eventually I fell somewhat behind.

------
rurban
Easy answer: Russia's education was for engineers, US for snowflakes.

Also it extents to CS. It's 10x easier to find competent Russian programmers
than in the US. They are dominating the various math contests or chess for
decades.

------
Tade0
My friend went to one of the best high schools in my country (Poland), where
students would, on their own accord, practice using old Soviet math textbooks.

I got my hands on one of them where the task stated was usually something
short, like: "доказать тождество", followed by a set of rather insane(at least
for a highschooler) equations.

That bit about a dearth of equipment is true in most eastern block countries
by the way. Case in point: the other day I asked my younger cousin, who's
currently doing his master's, if they still use those multimeters with nixie
tube displays like I did ten years ago.

They do.

------
amoorthy
My son started in the Russian School of Math - a pretty popular after-school
program in many US cities. What is fascinating is the core theory that algebra
can be grasped by children as young as 6. And there seems to be some truth to
this given my son's experience.

One random shout-out: I think if more of us learned math from folks like 3
Blue 1 Brown we would love it enough to explore it more. I don't know if I'm
smart enough to have become a master mathematician but I find myself falling
in love with math with every video he puts out.

------
gandalfgeek
It's not just math. Physics too. People from India who went through
engineering entrance exams like JEE will have fond (or horrific) memories of
"Problems in General Physics" by Irodov
([https://archive.org/details/IrodovProblemsInGeneralPhysics/m...](https://archive.org/details/IrodovProblemsInGeneralPhysics/mode/2up)).
Every problem in there was something to wrestle with.

~~~
saagarjha
Irodov is also a great resource when preparing for the USA Physics Olympiad.
(Other, slightly easier but still good ones are Morin's books.)

~~~
govg
The International Physics Olympiad and the IITJEE have a high correlation in
terms of material required as well as people who do well, it is probably the
Olympiad with the highest correlation between Olympiad performance and
performance in the JEE.

------
nickik
What all of this shows is that education and economy are really not very
related. This book makes the case:

> The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and
> Money

What happens is that companies just hire people who have proven that they are
not dumb enough to drop out of school and just did what they had to to move on
with their lives.

In the end the Western countries are richer, not because the students are
great, but because they have great opportunity and learn what they need to, so
they can get that opportunity.

The Soviet Union really was great at showing this, lots of super smart people,
good schools, lots of government investment in high tech, more effective
intellectual property theft then China now, cheap natural resources, cheap oil
and so on. Jet they couldn't really make a competitive economy.

Teach people the basics as efficiently as possible, show them where they can
learn more if they want to, give them some resources to do so if they want to
and let them find their way in a market economy.

------
usgroup
I feel lots of people have made the point that over time the emphasis on maths
has been reduced such that education would be more useful to more people. I.e
structuring the maths syllabus such that it would select for the maths super
stars does a poor job of giving the run of the mill student much value from
their maths education.

I do grad level maths every day but I’ve never stopped being a reluctant
mathematician. Sometimes the maths of the problem is insightful and
interesting but most of the time what I’m doing is battling to
express/validate an intuition in a formal language.

I think that emphasis on maths as a language for the exact representation of
your thoughts is maybe what the modern curriculum is up to, as opposed to the
emphasis of maths as the language of your thoughts. Just the same way that you
might write code to express designs; I think it’d be weird to think in code
although certainly some (maybe even the best) do think about software in
something closer to code than box diagrams.

------
Jugurtha
I stand by my answer[0] to that question.

[0]: [https://qr.ae/pNrgmY](https://qr.ae/pNrgmY)

~~~
anilakar
Heck, that was common knowledge some fifteen years ago during my freshman
year. I personally never bought those American coursebooks. For the price of
one brick, I could pretty much buy all the required self-study material
printed form. After my sophomore year, they did away with the university press
anyway and told the professors to just make their materials available in
electronic form.

Besides, when you're in uni, you're learning to study, not learning to be
hand-held.

------
tracker1
For that matter, look at say a 4th or 5th grade English textbook from the U.S.
pre-1970 compared to even High School book today.

------
hintymad
Economic reasons aside, I think Soviet educators also believe that rigorous
and challenging training will realize the greatest potential of students. The
top students are self-driven and usually get the best resources anyway. It is
the majority middle that need most rigorous and challenging training to
realize their full potential. Unfortunately, US educators in K-12 decided to
move in the opposite direction. David Klein's writing told appalling and sad
stories of how National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NTCM) won over the
course of last 100 years: \- A quarter century of US 'math wars' and political
partisanship \- A Brief History of American K-12 Mathematics Education in the
20th Century

By the way, US's upper-level college course and post-graduate textbooks are
hardcore too. If you don't believe me, go check out the Graduate Texts in
Mathematics.

------
fouc
My dad took the advanced courses for physics, math, organic chem in first year
University of Toronto in 1970. I've seen his textbooks and they were on the
same level of this. Much more advanced than what I saw in the 90s/00s. More
focus on reasoning from first principles, less focus on easily approachable
material.

Basically I'm saying that baby boomers had more advanced textbooks in their
university period compared to what their kids got in the 90s/00s. But also
less people went to university back then, it was more rigorously academic back
then.

~~~
Guest42
Yes, I think that websites are an analogous in the sense that eventually
adding features starts to get in the way

------
hliyan
> _because of the traditional scarcity of equipment, Russian students and
> scientists had to think rather than experiment_

This heavily resonated with me. Early in my career (late 90's - early 00's), I
had to develop the skill of _dry running_ (basically running a given block of
code with given inputs in my head and predicting the outcomes) because of
scarcity.

I was in a domain where I had to build 100,000+ lines of C++ into a single
executable, manually deploy to a remote Solaris machine and wait for up to 5
minutes for system re-initialization before I could run a simple test.

Needless to say, we learned to predict what our code does as we wrote it. The
idea of unit tests re-running automatically as you write new code in the IDE
would have been dismissed as an unattainable heaven (or maybe even considered
downright _satanic_ ).

------
eli555
I had a student from the Soviet Union in my class. He said they had no funding
for all the nice things we had in chemistry class. But that the difference was
that he had never seen so many people unwilling to learn anything, as he had
noted of American students.

------
rurban
Easy answer: Russia's education was for engineers, US for snowflakes.

Also it extents to CS. It's 10x easier to find competent Russian programmers
than in the US. They are dominating the various math contents or chess for
decades.

------
rq1
I still have my father’s MIR books and they seemed to me really practical and
pragmatic.

Especially the Smirnov (iirc) ones about differential calculus, where he
introduces it with a physics quantification problem.

You could then imagine objects moving around... etc.

Later on he introduces the formal definitions... informally (like “we
discussed this and that, let’s call this concept <concept> and if you think
about it if <assumption> then <theorem>“). It’s like a piece of literature or
a correspondance.

Compared to that, Bourbakis feel like being lost in a desert without anything
to drink nor eat but dry biscuits.

------
OJFord
All the answers (and discussion here) seems to take the title question as
fact. My initial reaction was - and I should say at this point I'm neither
from nor live in either country, and have no national pride or whatever to be
wounded by who has the harder-core textbooks - are they actually? Or do they
just cover _different_ material, that the US curriculum happens to get to
later?

It's a pity Quora doesn't have a question 'body', like StackExchange does for
example, such that the asker could've given an example.

------
rb808
The real question should be is why are US textbooks so hard when most people
never need HS math after finishing school, and lack so many other skills that
are never taught.

~~~
rimliu
Unless you count thinking as an important skill.

It alway baffles me when I see "why don't they teach how to do taxes?". Well
they do teach you how to read and hiw to do maths? How hard it is the to put 2
and 2 together?

~~~
mschuster91
Taxes and maths are two very different things. The math part of taxes usually
is _easy_ , what's complex are the countless rules around it, e.g. what can be
counted as a deductible expense and what not - additionally, most rules don't
even make logical sense as they were written for political reasons (i.e. to
appease one or another voter/corporate interest group).

------
meritocracy66
Because Soviet math textbooks target a different audience: those kids who
really enjoy math and derive pleasure in a bit of complexity (think Sheldon
Cooper from BBT). You can call them elitist. Nobody cares about the other
kids.

US textbooks, on the other hand, are targeted towards more general audience--
the average student. That doesn't make them bad, just different.

------
Koshkin
Most American grad level math textbooks are as hardcore as it gets; undergrad,
not so much, especially compared to such introductory texts as, say, _Beginner
's Course in Topology: Geometric Chapters_ by Rokhlin et al. which, I’d say,
is extreme in its hard-coreness. (A popular text by Munkres, by comparison, is
a children’s book.)

------
aks_tldr
Ah mir publications, One of my favorite book during school was elementary
mathematics by them. [https://www.amazon.com/Elementary-Mathematics-G-
Dorofeev/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/Elementary-Mathematics-G-
Dorofeev/dp/8123908423)

------
grabball
I'm the only one who hates quora.com?

------
readwind
What a mountain of USSR and eastern-europe people there are in this thread; so
refreshing; this is great.

------
LatteLazy
I don't know about the Soviets, but American books always seem to take longer
to say less than other countries texts. I think it's a volume thing: Americans
see 400 pages and think it must be twice the product of a 200 page
alternative...

~~~
widforss
My father always told me that American textbook authors got paid by the page.
That's probably not true, but it certainly _feels_ that way when reading them.

------
lymeeducator
Curious, with 2 smaller grade school children in the Midwest, that I am now
"home schooling" during the pandemic, I find the teachers spend minimal time
on math and I have to supplement them...a lot.

------
nubero
Funny… My father worked in Protvino in the early 70s for a CERN Project…

------
8589934591
Anyone have any links for recommended textbooks? It'd be nice to have a sort
of roadmap for a self learner. Especially recommended soviet textbooks.

------
rawoke083600
First thing that comes to mind when reading this headline the "Ivan Drakov
Meme" with "If he fails, he fails" :D

------
Koshkin
It may be just that Russian style of teaching is more conservative and
preserved the way teaching was done in the 1800s.

~~~
konart
> teaching was done in the 1800s.

Teaching whom? Peasants?

Soviet system was build as an attempt to provide schooling for every one, what
kind of schooling of 1800 you are even talking about?

~~~
p_l
Advanced schooling used to be for the elites.

With the revolutions, the system was simply expanded, not created from scratch
anew. So you would have the methods used to teach the elites be the
foundations of the new system.

------
jonnypotty
Queue a load of people extrapolating their own personal experiences into
generalisations covering the entire country

------
cafard
A neighbor in Washington, DC, sent her son for tutoring at the so-named
Russian School of Mathematics here.

------
simplegeek
Who are some of the famous Russian authors for high school maths?

Sorry about going on a tangent but looking for good books for my kid.

Thanks!

------
Havoc
The teachers too. We had one that could work out trig stuff in her head to a
fair amount of decimals.

------
oarabbus_
How do Soviet high school math/physics texts compare to those of China, and
India?

~~~
govg
I can't speak for China, but in India there has not been a historically large
amount of attention paid to writing textbooks in mathematics and physics.
During high school, the students who seek challenging problems often fall back
to Russian text books, especially in physics. More recently there has been a
push by some Indian authors, so you will find some challenging texts by Indian
authors, but still nowhere close to say Krotov or Irodov for physics.

------
moscow_math
Would someone mind providing texts that particularly exemplify the Soviet
style?

------
virmundi
America did this too. There was the New Math trend in the 50-60s which feels
like common core. Here's a comedy song about it from that
era.[https://youtu.be/UIKGV2cTgqA](https://youtu.be/UIKGV2cTgqA)

~~~
jnbiche
New Math was very far from Common Core. New Math included generous coursework
on abstract algebra and discrete mathematics, both of which are almost
entirely ignored in Common Core. Common Core is carefully considered, but
pretty traditional.

Common Core is still a good curriculum for the minimal level of math US
society wants primary and secondary students to learn. But it's not nearly
expansive and innovative as New Math was.

------
stjohnswarts
I still think the US/The West model won this battle.

------
Hard_Space
I moved to Romania three years ago, and was surprised to find the same kind of
specialist/vocational high school paths have been in use a long time in this
country. Once you hit teen years you might find yourself, if you worked hard
enough, in one of the more prestigious specialized high school institutions
for one of many subjects, such as architecture, medicine, physics or the arts.

It seemed to me a huge pressure to put on such young shoulders, to commit to a
career path so early, but that's the aptitude-based system that dominated
under communism. Since the schools are so prestigious, much of that system
still remains.

------
yters
I think it comes down to communism. According to Marx's book "The Machine" the
end game of communism is essentially an omnibenevolent AI. Marx thought
eventually all forms of labor would be mechanised into a colossal machine that
would run the world. Thus, the whole point of education is to train the
geniuses in math, science, and technology in order to bring about this machine
god. That's, in my opinion, why there is such a huge emphasis on those
subjects in the Soviet system. All the other subjects are full of questions
and speculation, and in general seem useless from that perspective once you
believe you've reduced the aspirations of the humanities' longing for justice
and truth to an engineering problem to solve.

~~~
TimTheTinker
That’s fascinating... and somewhat terrifying. Because it seems clear to me
that it won’t require communism or totalitarianism to achieve that kind of
endgame (or at least, to get really close to it).

Perhaps the communist/totalitarian/power-hungry nations of the world are
sitting back and waiting for us in western nations to build such a system
(think AWS, but 30 years from now). All they have to do is get complete
control of it by one method or another, and then they’ve won.

One would think a proper national defense-in-depth mindset dictates carefully
considering and planning for such a future.

~~~
yters
Here's the cite:
[http://thenewobjectivity.com/pdf/marx.pdf](http://thenewobjectivity.com/pdf/marx.pdf)

"once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour
passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or
rather, an automatic system of machinery (system of machinery: the automatic
one is merely its most complete, most adequate form, and alone transforms
machinery into a system), set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that
moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and
intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its
conscious linkages"

~~~
claudiawerner
I don't think it makes much sense to say this is a state of affairs Marx would
want to see in a communist society; to be honest, I have no idea where you get
the idea that Marx envisioned a totalizing AI controlling society from. The
Fragment on Machines is highly debated and analyzed in Marxology, but it
doesn't imply what you think it implies. Marx's description of communist
society is actually quite the opposite (from his TGI):

>He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must
remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in
communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each
can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general
production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another
tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the
evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming
hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

Post-Marxist authors and other Marxists have quite a lot to say on machinery
and totalization of society to administered control (which they view as a
negative thing) - see Marcuse for instance.

~~~
yters
Wouldn't having an omnibenevolent AI providing for everyone's needs free
everyone from having to be a laborer, so anyone can choose to be one thing one
day and another thing another day? I see my passage and yours working
together.

From what I understand, Marx didn't see communism as subverting capitalism,
but as the end result of capitalism. He just wanted to hasten the process
along towards an outcome which he saw as already predetermined by economic
forces.

------
DeathArrow
I grew up in a former eastern block country.

There are many reasons for this:

In USSR and other communist countries, there was a pressure towards having
more scientists, engineers and highly trained specialists. To achieve this,
they had to foster excellence.

US educational system is optimized for inclusion, diversity and money making.
This means technical and scientific subjects are watered down so nobody is
left behind. USSR and eastern block educational systems were built to cater to
the most gifted students and produce scientific excellence. That is also true
for some parts of Europe today, China, India and South Korea and maybe some
other asian countries.

There was also a lack of distractions so it was easier for the kids in schools
and students in universities to concentrate on learning.

In general, kids were expected to do a lot of homework each day and during
vacations - I remember doing tens of math exercises each day and hundreds in
vacation.

There were special classes in high school for more talented kids - where they
got to do more math, physics, chemistry than their peers. Those classes had
the best teachers.

Best kids at math or other sciences had supplementary training, they stayed
after hours and learned more advanced concepts often with University teachers.

The school books in secondary schools and high schools weren't authored by
educators but by best scientist in their fields. Learning programs were unique
and developed also by the best in their fields, not by educators.

Teachers followed very rigorous training in universities, so they were
actually skilled in the field they taught.

Everything builds over notions taught in previous years. There's no shortcut,
no constant remembering of elementary notions.

Everything was taught with proofs, in a logical manner. There was no "magic".
No teacher said "this thing works this way, you have to trust me on this".
Instead, all things were proofed and the students had to learn all the "whys"
along with the "hows". If you were a high school student and forgot one more
advanced integration or derivation formula, there's no problem in deducting it
from more basic theory.

One could enroll in a technical Faculty at University only after a series of
very difficult exams. Sometimes you had to fight with 30 - 40 others for a
place.

Once students reached higher education, the mediocre were weed out, leaving
University teacher concetrating on teaching most advanced concepts to the kind
of people whou could grasp them and were interested.

Since any kind of education was free, and in many cases state provided free
food and housing and many scholarship for many university students and some
high school students, the state wanted to otimized their returns. That meant
getting the most highly trained specialists they could for the resources they
used in education.

Students were also motivated to learn, because a job as a scientist or
engineer was deemed a much better career than working long shifts in cold
factories.

To conclude: the communist regime had to compete with the West somehow, and in
that competition they had to make learning a very competitive space.

US educational system lives from the money payd by students, or by funding
based on the number of students, so on one hand it has to attract more and
more students so it earns more money. US educational system is more and more
impacted by ideology, and scientific education is more and more watered down,
even at the best universities.[1]

For now, that impact on education is solved by bringing lots of people
educated elsewhere. It will probably work this way as long as US has better
standard of living. I think it is not a safe bet to rely in the long term, and
since standard of living will constantly improve in other countries, US has to
better its scientific and technical education, not worsen it.

[1] [https://www.city-journal.org/html/how-identity-politics-
harm...](https://www.city-journal.org/html/how-identity-politics-harming-
sciences-15826.html)

------
steve76
The answer points to ingenuity due to a lack of resources which is susceptible
to obsolescence.

School in the USA does a lot more than just educate, for instance child
protection services and employment. The USA also takes everyone, specifically
the violent and malicious, due to compassion.

The USA suffered: \- multiple World Wars \- a fifty year Cold War that was
just as bad \- multiple nuclear standoffs \- horrific terrorism \- black
market drug smuggling, probably the gravest problem today \- repeated
invasions \- a Civil War which involved foreign intervention \- attempts at
colonial occupation \- originally being made as a death camp and penal colony

------
mnw21cam
"Please enable Javascript and refresh the page to continue"

I don't want to "continue", I would just like to read the article.

------
tapatio
In Soviet Russia, you teach textbook.

------
LaserToy
Because Spartaaaaa.

But honestly, I always thought it is because whoever wrote them didn’t care to
make them easier as they were not competing for the student.

But yep, they are total hardcore.

------
readhn
...and all those hardcore math books still couldnt help avoid a society that
is now run by a bunch of thugs and "thieves in law".

~~~
mam2
I'm confused whether you are talking about US or Russia right now.

