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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. Cana
by c-smile 7y ago
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.
- pdonis 7y ago> University on the West gets its money directly from students Actually, many if not most of them get the majority of their funding from government research grants and investments of their endowment, not tuition.
- roel_v 7y agoDoesn't matter from the pov of the university. The GP's point was that 'money source' and 'educational facility' are the same in USSR, but not in the West.
- smohare 7y agoOr perhaps the “hardcore” texts are just poorly written?
- c-smile 7y agoYeah, that's what I said, "poorly written" is a criteria that can be applied to belletristic more than to science text books. Russian math books have just few words, formulas are the rest. What can be poorly written there? Kidding :)
- ssivark 7y agoAu contraire, they’re some of the best textbooks I’ve had the fortune of reading! :-) They make the student work (participate actively in your own education), which I’ve noticed that American textbooks (at least modern high school & college textbooks) seem loath to do. I don’t know why — you don’t develop what you don’t exercise!
- concerned_user 7y agoIf you open any soviet textbook you will see the following text on title page: (loosely translated) "Supplementary reading for students of xx specialties higher education" it can school level or college level. But in essence those books are an addition to the course which is mainly delivered by lectures. You can study by yourself but it will be hard and you will need extra material to replace lectures.
- madhadron 7y agoHaving worked from translations and occasionally originals of some of the Russian texts, they're actually utterly marvelous.
- visarga 7y agoSame situation in Romania, some of the best math problem books I found were a bunch of books printed before 1980's. The problems were just wonderful. I was desperately searching for them for my kids through my father's library. In 1990's after the revolution we got humanitarian aid from Western Europe, including some French math textbooks. They were so low level (simple) I was in disbelief. Useless.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoI had the same reaction in Poland, when my grandfather gave me some textbooks from his collection. They were an order of magnitude better than what I was using at school.
- ddalex 7y agoand, somehow, the economic and social system in France is much better than the one in Romania my take is that the western-style school focuses on getting students life skills, while the eastern-Europe one focuses on cramming knowledge in the brain
- visarga 7y agoMaybe it's also the context, the gradual buildup France had over Romania at the time and now. Romania endured the communist regime for many decades and was very much isolated.
- playing_colours 7y agoCan you please share some books you enjoyed?
- madhadron 7y ago
- Endlessly 7y agoRead, 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?
- ummwhat 7y agoI think the reasoning is that the incentives are flipped. Capitalist school gets more money the more you stick around. Communist school spends more money the more you stick around. One has a perverse incentive to get as many people to pass as possible. The other has a perverse incentive to get as many people to fail as possible.
- Endlessly 7y agoOne would think Russia would have demand for strong advanced mathematics professionals, so unclear how failing students might help that. Missing something in the reasoning though, since I get that if you’re giving away something for free, you want to maximize the yield it returns, but still, it does not add up to me. Further, reasoning that American schools get money might hold true for tuition based schools, but my understanding is that large percentage of pre-university mathematics courses are taught for free. So again, doesn’t make sense to me, because if that was the case, all schools would charge and majority of students would finish university to maximize the profits, and again, this does not match my understanding of how things work.
- silentwanderer 7y agoI think the point is that Russia's programs isolated those who had a talent/passion for math as opposed to just trying to bring every student to a basic level of understanding. If a student doesn't have the drive/talent/passion for a field, it follows that they will not perform as well in the workforce as their driven/talented/enthusiastic peers.
- 7y ago
- eigenvector 7y agoIn Canadian universities you typically have 3 to 5 levels of mathematics courses for students specializing in something other than math. The highest level of rigour would only be found in the courses for mathematicians, with physics, engineering and computer science students studying many of the same concepts but less rigorously and with comparatively little attention to deriving results from first principles. Was the approach the same in the USSR?
- c-smile 7y agoFirst 3 years all students of all Sciences (Math included) and all Engineering specialties were getting the same (mandatory) set of courses. Only rest 2 or 3 years were variable. As of Canadian Universities. UBC in particular. Anecdotical evidence, but still. Friend of mine, owner of small factory here in Vancouver, asked me once to assemble him software department specifically from Eastern Europe people. On question "why?" he answered - they are engineers first and programmers only second, and UBC makes CS people.
- winter_blue 7y ago> asked me once to assemble him software department specifically from Eastern Europe people I hope your friend realizes that this is clear-cut racial/ethnicity-based discrimination. It's a violation of the Canadian Human Rights Act, see: https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/rights-workplace.html https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/rights-w...
- c-smile 7y ago> I hope your friend realizes that this is clear-cut racial/ethnicity-based discrimination. That is absolutely orthogonal to business requirements to be honest. Especially when you need to establish production of anything as primitive as N95s. Of course you can send airplanes all around the world for them (https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-at-least-two-canada-chartered-planes-return-from-china-without-medical/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-at-least-tw...) but when they will return empty, that thin reasoning layer will vaporize almost immediately.
- Retric 7y agoIMO, the point of textbooks is to educate people on some topic so making them as easy as possible seems like the correct choice. Outside of competitions, the value most people get from those courses is what them remember in 5+ years when their working not really the kind of symbol manipulation that makes can make things opaque. That said, soviet style education produced a lot of great mathematicians especially relative to population sizes. But it’s not clear to me if that’s an outgrowth of better education or economic forces.
- MR4D 7y agoSomewhat cynically, I think the point of many textbooks is to make money for the authors. There is no reason why a calculus book needs to cost $200 (in the 1990’s) and get refreshed every 2-3 years. That subject has been known for hundreds of years and they rob poor engineering and science student of that $200. Sorry, I just have a bad taste in my mouth from crap like that in undergrad. Not saying you’re wrong, just think it’s more greed oriented than we’d like to think.
- coliveira 7y agoNot only that, but the books are horrible! Authors are incentivized to throw as much verbiage as possible, and this makes students' lives more difficult. It is much preferable to have a more concise book that goes to the core of what you need to learn.
- MR4D 7y agoAgreed 1,000,000% ! If Stan Lee wrote calculus textbooks, everyone would be good at math. [0] [0] - ok, so I came up with that off the top of my head. But the more I think about it, the better the idea seems to me. Any thoughts?
- tigerente 7y agoNo, almost nothing of the $200 actually goes to the author. A typical share goes like this: (concrete numbers for Germany) 50% of the sticker price goes to the book seller, 7% to tax, the remainder to printing, typesetting, logistics, the publishing house etc. A typical author would get somewhere between 4-7% of the net sales. Most books, especially advanced science books, on the market (not your College 101, not NYT bestsellers) sell only in the order of hundreds, maybe a few thousand copies. The vast majority of books doesn't even earn the advance back. The reason why they are often not good, is that it takes months to write 500 pages of well-thought out, well-delivered material, and the incentive to do that for $5000 is relatively low.
- Bayart 7y ago>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. I guess Western Europe isn't part of the West anymore.
- c-smile 7y agoYes, and actually Soviet/Russian education system has it roots in classic German one where Spießrutenlaufen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_the_gauntlet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_the_gauntlet) was a great educational tool (see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birching#/media/File:Koerperstrafe-_MA_Birkenrute.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birching#/media/File:Koerperst...).
- guerrilla 7y agoCombined with the parent comment, I think that makes it a perverse incentive here, depending on who is setting yhe standards.
- azmodeus 7y agoRather than straw man the Prussian system you could iron man it. Corporal punishment was common when the Prussian system was founded (1800s) across the world. The system provided free education for the lowest rungs of society for the first time in Europe, that's a mighty achievement! Pedagogically it is a hierarchical system with a strong focus on authority. It doesn't encourage questioning authority outside of the sciences which is a feature for the authoritarian societies deploying this educational model.
- lower 7y agoSpießrutenlaufen was used by the military and was a severe, often fatal punishment. It was certainly not a great educational tool.
- c-smile 7y agoHa! With my University diploma I've also got a rank of Lieutenant-reserve of РВСН (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Missile_Forces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Missile_Forces) so the procedure is metaphorically close :D