> success of former soviet countries in Maths [...] there appears to be a difference in how schooling handles suffering/frustration in those cultures I agree w

> success of former soviet countries in Maths [...] there appears to be a difference in how schooling handles suffering/frustration in those cultures I agree with what you wrote, but there is yet another part of the puzzle, various extracurricular educational activities. Things like the International Mathematical Olympiad, which during its first two decades was mostly an Eastern Bloc thing; or the Russian popular-science magazine for kids, Kvant. I suspect that these extracurricular activities were more responsible for the peak math performance in former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe that whatever was happening at schools. Mere school knowledge was never enough to win the math olympiad. Going further, the reason why so much energy was spent in this direction, was that mathematics and physics were the only sciences that you could do in former soviet countries without risk of accidentally saying something politically incorrect and bringing doom on yourself and your family. (As far as I know, there was nothing in math comparable to e.g. Lysenkoism in biology. And humanities were pure ideology.) The smart people couldn't become entrepreneurs anyway, so many of them enjoyed teaching math and physics; it provided them a parallel universe they could escape to.