> If you ever got to being a candidate for, say, a national senior-school physics competition, you'd be transferred to region's best teachers.
This is not a bad thing. It is completely the opposite to some Western ideals to ensure that everyone gets the same (bad) education. I think that the motto for a lot of guys on the left is that if everyone is kept behind no-one loses.
> It is completely the opposite to some Western ideals to ensure that everyone gets the same (bad) education.
School education is not a good predictor of future performance. I would venture to say that above some (fairly modest) threshold of quality, the difference in schooling is irrelevant.
> What is incredibly interesting to note is that Russia and several eastern bloc countries perform better than the USA in math (school age – according to OECD TIMMS test).
This is not what made the great Russian mathematicians though. You don't get feynmanns and turings by locking up kids to solve monotonous puzzles.
> In all fairness, the USSR did produce quite a few excellent physicists. Per capita it probably outranks the USA for Nobel Prize winners in Physics.
Of course it doesn't. Even the UK is way ahead of USSR on that metric.
There were plenty of great Soviet physicists and champions in other sciences, but bear in mind that at least half of them were product of pre-Soviet, imperial school system.
> School education is not a good predictor of future performance. I would venture to say that above some (fairly modest) threshold of quality, the difference in schooling is irrelevant.
I beg to differ. School performance in mathematics and science directly impacts on the careers of people. A good example is engineering – it is pretty difficult for someone to study engineering without a good and solid mathematical foundation.
> Of course it doesn't. Even the UK is way ahead of USSR on that metric.
The UK and the USA is per capita twice to three times as rich as Russia/USSR. Britain also has the advantage of drawing out all of the brains out of the Commonwealth. A large percentage of American PhDs came from Europe (either Jews who fled or Germans who came afterwards). A lot of them were not educated in the USA.
I would venture that the Soviet Union/Russia’s scientific accomplishments is pretty spectacular for when all is taken into account.
This is not a bad thing. It is completely the opposite to some Western ideals to ensure that everyone gets the same (bad) education. I think that the motto for a lot of guys on the left is that if everyone is kept behind no-one loses.
What is incredibly interesting to note is that Russia and several eastern bloc countries perform better than the USA in math (school age – according to OECD TIMMS test). Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trends_in_International_Mathema...
This is quite shocking since the USA spends a lot more on education and is a few times richer.
> Granted you'd know a lot about pulleys and levers and displacement, but it wouldn't make you any good physicist.
In all fairness, the USSR did produce quite a few excellent physicists. Per capita it probably outranks the USA for Nobel Prize winners in Physics.