> 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.

>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 Germany (the model country for engineering and science) and more or less worked in practice. 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 the 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. I'm glad 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.

I actually prefer the policy of people repeating the grade, rather than school graduating people who dont understand basic math

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."

>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.

Yeah, those who excel build artillery systems, those who fail are destined to be a cannon fodder.

Your first paragraph is precisely it, at least from my experience living in Eastern Europe for a few years in the 2000s.

> 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 don't see a representative sample.

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.

Another thing to add, eastern Europe has comparable talent to western one and US, but a smaller budget.

That made eastern Europeans excel in sciences that needed a smaller budget (e.g. electro chemistry is much cheaper than photonics).

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.