> they're bringing people down. It was that way in the USSR, and it's that way here. This claim about the USSR seems strange to me. In high school, I had a co

> they're bringing people down. It was that way in the USSR, and it's that way here. This claim about the USSR seems strange to me. In high school, I had a couple of classmates from the USSR and they had been attending advanced schools since childhood. They were brilliant mathematicians. The state-sponsored educational system had recognized their talents and lifted them up. I understood the collapse of the Soviet Union to be a net loss for educational funding, but I am by no means sure of this.