alt Hacker NewsQuick question.
What do soviets make great researchers? I noticed this pattern in ml, math & physics research.
Is it that they have better quality books?
Replies
Math and physics are more theoretical in curriculum and less students can grasp, but ones who do perform better. So, higher input filter, earlier talent detection. Western education is more applied to a business, Russian is more like a generic theory. This makes Western schools prepare to develop, Russian to research. Note this is a generic distinction, MIT and Stanford are higher standards and provide access to field practitioners so my take it is genuinely provide more quality than MSU or Baumanka alike.
Competition. Nobody in the US cares about school math/physics/... olympiads. But they are/were a big deal in schools in the xUSSR.
There also was no centralized test system (like SAT) up until early 2000-s. People had to go and sit on entrance exams in each university where they wanted to apply. But winners of olympiads got automatic admission into good universities.
In addition, social sciences were a minefield in the USSR, especially subjects like political science or history. And hard sciences were safe.
I think part of it is that unlike in the US, access to education wasn't paywalled.
Higher education in the US, with the exception of scholarships here and there, requires you to come from a wealthy background to afford the best schools.
In other words, it's more about perpetuating class privilege than it is about developing the best and brightest of a generation. If you're a genius with poor parents, you have to really hope to get lucky enough to get a scholarship.
In socialist societies, despite the claims often leveled against them, things were more meritocratic. If you're a genius with poor parents, you got access to the best education as that's what's optimal for society.
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They had a thing of encouraging talent and putting it in special schools to develop it. Then Maths reading groups etc.