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The Hungarian Approach and How It Fits the American Educational Landscape (2015)

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Re: The Hungarian Approach and How It Fits the American Educational Landscape (2015)

#41

Post by underwoodley »

roi wrote: post #32
underwoodley wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to be curious for more than five minutes. Several of those mentioned are Jewish, but most of them are not. There are not disproportionately more Jewish Hungarian mathematicians, compared to the proportion of say, Jewish people in Budapest before WWII, or the proportion of Jewish people in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Looking only at the first half of the twentieth century, there at least as many world-…

Except for Bolyai, all mentioned above are indeed Jewish. Also all mentioned in your other comment (Fejér etc.) except Bollobás. Also Wigner, mentioned in another comment.

I stand corrected. I wrongly believed that many of these including Fejer and von Neumann were not Jewish.

I think the comparison with other populations such as Poland still seems to point out that something about Hungary in the 20th century was special, other than the presence of many Jewish people.

Re: The Hungarian Approach and How It Fits the American Educational Landscape (2015)

#42

Post by ptero »

leni536 wrote: post #30

I would like to point out two of my favorite high school competitions in Hungary. One is KöMaL [1]. It's a monthly journal, one has to send back solutions to the problems. The competition is during the whole school year. It has problems from math, physics and computer science, these are separate contests. I did the "P" (theoretical physics) competition. Sometimes I took a look for the "B" math problems and I could ne…

Russia (Soviet Union actually) had somewhat similar mail in programs that IMO we're very useful to stimulate those with high interest in specific fields beyond what a school would do.

IMO stimulating and developing top end is something sorely missing in US education, which is mostly focusing on helping those behind to catch up. That is useful, but pushing 1-2% of best students as far as possible is just as important for the society long term. My 2c.

Re: The Hungarian Approach and How It Fits the American Educational Landscape (2015)

#43

Post by haihaibye »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #39
haihaibye wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ashkenazi Jews have an average IQ of 108-112 compared to a European average of ~100. This shifted mean means they have a much higher percentage of very smart people (~6 times per capita rate of >140iq which is the norm for Nobel prize winners) This over representation of high IQ is similar to the historical over representation in Nobel prizes for hard sciences.

You can't make conclusions about the number >140 based on a shift of the mean. IQ is scaled so that the general population has a normal distribution. That doesn't necessarily mean some subpopulation has a normal distribution. Even if that was the case, the subpopulation distribution would still have a different standard deviation. (It would partly depend on the level of assortative mating within that population.)

Thanks for expanding on the assumptions I was lazy and just used a ~ to indicate it was approximate.

Re: The Hungarian Approach and How It Fits the American Educational Landscape (2015)

#44

Post by kbart »

baxtr wrote: post #33
loriverkutya wrote: post #24

As a hungarian, I'm pretty surprised by this article, since the quality of hungarian education is getting worse and worse, thanks to the "reforms", which basically means they are spending less and less on education on all level. And however in the past, math education was world class, now the "old school" teachers are retiring and other than a handful of elite schools (Fazekas, Eötvös, Radnóti etc) most of the school…

> since the quality of hungarian education is getting worse and worse, thanks to the "reforms", which basically means they are spending less and less on education on all level I always wondered what good metrics are to measure the quality of education. Since you say “worse and worse” can you share any insight to that? I mean you could potentially refer to the OECD world rankings but somehow I don’t trust those lists,…

I'm not the OP, but I'm from another Eastern Europe country where education level falls fast and dramatically. Few key indicators of that:

0. I was attending an elite gymnasium and we deliberately used old "hard science" (math, physics, chemistry) textbooks from 70'-80', because they were much more advance level than modern ones. Most of math/physics taught during first/second year at university now, was taught in 11-12th grade back then.

1. Anecdotally, but all teachers complain that every year students are getting less motivated, performing poorer, having shorter attention spans. With local "no children left behind" equivalent it's enough just to attend some percentage of classes to get passable grades.

2. Every few years some kind of "reform" is performed to reduce the difficulty of final exams to maintain failure rates at bay and keep statistics nice.

3. Combined points 1 with 2 this leads to universities full of students that have neither motivation nor skills to perform there. Since such students make up majority in most less popular programs, the difficulty level is also reduced to adapt.

4. Degrading higher level education quality reflects on its prestige as potential employees no longer trust universities to produce prospective candidates. This closes the loop back to point 1 as current pupils deem education "worthless".

5. Fun fact: entrance exams to non-prestigious universities from 70'-80' were (maybe still are) widely used as assignments in national level competitions when I was at school (late nineties to early 00'). To paraphrase that -- a skill level that once was expected from anybody who wanted to be accepted in university now puts you at the very top.

Re: The Hungarian Approach and How It Fits the American Educational Landscape (2015)

#45

Post by [deleted] »

baxtr wrote: post #33
loriverkutya wrote: post #24

As a hungarian, I'm pretty surprised by this article, since the quality of hungarian education is getting worse and worse, thanks to the "reforms", which basically means they are spending less and less on education on all level. And however in the past, math education was world class, now the "old school" teachers are retiring and other than a handful of elite schools (Fazekas, Eötvös, Radnóti etc) most of the school…

> since the quality of hungarian education is getting worse and worse, thanks to the "reforms", which basically means they are spending less and less on education on all level I always wondered what good metrics are to measure the quality of education. Since you say “worse and worse” can you share any insight to that? I mean you could potentially refer to the OECD world rankings but somehow I don’t trust those lists,…

[deleted]

Re: The Hungarian Approach and How It Fits the American Educational Landscape (2015)

#46

Post by pliny »

patkai wrote: post #28
koube wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is Hungarian math so forward looking but not the other subjects? Is Hungary especially good at math?

This question is not just worth understanding in itself but it would be essential to ask at many levels, as science education is becoming the key to the survival of humanity. As a Hungarian who left the country 20 years ago I have been fascinated by this surprising success of the country, partly because I did not personally get a good science education there. Actually, it was very unbalanced, with most of it barely m…

>Anyway, it is possible to do this again and with two small kids I'm very interested to know how.

Here's a context-relevant place to start: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/31/book-review-raise-a-gen...

Re: The Hungarian Approach and How It Fits the American Educational Landscape (2015)

#47

Post by xab9 »

baxtr wrote: post #33
loriverkutya wrote: post #24

As a hungarian, I'm pretty surprised by this article, since the quality of hungarian education is getting worse and worse, thanks to the "reforms", which basically means they are spending less and less on education on all level. And however in the past, math education was world class, now the "old school" teachers are retiring and other than a handful of elite schools (Fazekas, Eötvös, Radnóti etc) most of the school…

> since the quality of hungarian education is getting worse and worse, thanks to the "reforms", which basically means they are spending less and less on education on all level I always wondered what good metrics are to measure the quality of education. Since you say “worse and worse” can you share any insight to that? I mean you could potentially refer to the OECD world rankings but somehow I don’t trust those lists,…

Most of the articles I would be able to dig up are in Hungarian. Like the thread op said, PISA scores are generally used around here and they are not nice. Like he or she said, education affairs are "not great" nowdays. The government increases centralisation, forcefully decreases teacher authority and freedom, the wages are still very low (even though multiple raises had been promised), the things you need to learn are way too much and not particularly useful et cetera.

Re: The Hungarian Approach and How It Fits the American Educational Landscape (2015)

#48

Post by dgut »

niftich wrote: post #15
tehlike wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can you give couple examples that are most prominent?

János Bolyai [1], Theodore von Kármán [2], Leo Szilard [3], Dennis Gabor [4], Edward Teller [5], Paul Erdős [6], John von Neumann [7]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A1nos_Bolyai [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_von_Kármán [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Szilard [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Gabor [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Teller [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul…

With the exception of Bolyai, those are all Jewish. AFAIK Hungary did push above its weight for some time, but that was thanks to its Jewish population. Ironically Hungarians are extremely antisemitic, although nearly all known Hungarians were/are Jewish. Good riddance!

Re: The Hungarian Approach and How It Fits the American Educational Landscape (2015)

#49

Post by fogetti »

kbart wrote: post #44
baxtr wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> since the quality of hungarian education is getting worse and worse, thanks to the "reforms", which basically means they are spending less and less on education on all level I always wondered what good metrics are to measure the quality of education. Since you say “worse and worse” can you share any insight to that? I mean you could potentially refer to the OECD world rankings but somehow I don’t trust those lists,…

I'm not the OP, but I'm from another Eastern Europe country where education level falls fast and dramatically. Few key indicators of that: 0. I was attending an elite gymnasium and we deliberately used old "hard science" (math, physics, chemistry) textbooks from 70'-80', because they were much more advance level than modern ones. Most of math/physics taught during first/second year at university now, was taught in 11…

> Most of math/physics taught during first/second year at university now, was taught in 11-12th grade back then.

(Foreword: Hungarian here) I didn't know that this happened in other Easter European countries as well. We used to have the same thing, that people in 11-12th grade learned (around 70'-80') the first-second year university curriculum.

But by the time I got into secondary and university education the system had changed and we adopted our system to the crappy Western-European credit and whatnot system (Bologna process anybody?).

This had the obvious drawback that the first semester of university still assumed the same knowledge in 11-12th grade from me, which I completely lacked by the time I arrived to starting my undergraduate years. In turn the first 1-2 years sucked big time in uni (for me at least).

I guess this also answers the previous commenter's question how did it get worse and worse.

Re: The Hungarian Approach and How It Fits the American Educational Landscape (2015)

#50

Post by dalbasal »

kbart wrote: post #44
baxtr wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> since the quality of hungarian education is getting worse and worse, thanks to the "reforms", which basically means they are spending less and less on education on all level I always wondered what good metrics are to measure the quality of education. Since you say “worse and worse” can you share any insight to that? I mean you could potentially refer to the OECD world rankings but somehow I don’t trust those lists,…

I'm not the OP, but I'm from another Eastern Europe country where education level falls fast and dramatically. Few key indicators of that: 0. I was attending an elite gymnasium and we deliberately used old "hard science" (math, physics, chemistry) textbooks from 70'-80', because they were much more advance level than modern ones. Most of math/physics taught during first/second year at university now, was taught in 11…

Curious.

Instinctively, I tend to factor in a certains bias for "kids these days." Seems a lot of us have a tendency to think educational standards and/or kids' level of knowledge is poorer than before. That said, in the 80s/90s I had a lot of Russian school friends in my neighborhood. Even for primary school age, they had special "russian math" classes taught by a neighborhood parent in the afternoons. They basically followed the old 70s-80s curriculum that you guys are talking about. So basically, I'm convinced it's not just the codger instinct. They were 3-4 years ahead of the 3rd & 4th graders.

These days, I have a few eastern european (polish, slovak & lithuanian) friends with schoolkids of their own. They had the same view of the modern/western curriculum as my childhood friends' parents had. It's substandard. Two years ago one couple moved back to lithuania. She reckons the modern standard for math is as bad as it is here, these days.

To hazard a guess, I think that the old/soviet-ish system was very rigorous but not very enjoyable for the kids, especially below average kids. For example, it was very sequential and intolerant of a bad week. But, it probably produced a much better educated top half. Also, I think the old educational systems of the later soviet era got a lot of criticism for being too focused on math & science, with not enough creativity, humanities and such. Soviet era "liberal arts" were ideologically impacted, and I think people developed a tendency to just stay away.

But much of Eastern Europe has a strong tradition of arts and humanities, and a cultural tendency to promote it. From a purely traditional-cultural perspective, many Lithuanians would like as much art and philosophy in their kids education as French parents, the European high watermark for teenage philosophy classes. I think there was pressure to get these subjects into the system, with due respect.

Anyway, there's plenty of proofs-of-concept that math & science education could be a lot better. We're nowhere near the ideal pedagogical system.

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