Why are Soviet math textbooks so hardcore in comparison to US textbooks? (2017)

The thing is, if you accept the basic "liberal arts" idea of education that it's about creating a common culture, then a lot of the ideas coming from the social justice side of things actually make some sense. From the "liberal" point of view, one of the purposes of English lit class and education in general is to create a common background that people in professional settings can use in conversation - I can use my favourite Shakespearean metaphor to argue a point and I know that you, as an educated colleague, will understand what I mean. I could talk about CRT/I and say "something wicked this way comes" if I wanted to, and you could hopefully decode that. Otherwise I'd have the Herculean task of having to keep a database of which of my colleagues understand which kinds of analogies, or reduce all my communication to the lowest common denominator. For example, I'm assuming here that the expressions "Herculean" and "lowest common denominator" (as a figure of speech) mean something to readers on HN.

If you accept this point of view - and lots of educators past and present have done so, including white male ones - then the student slogan "Why is my curriculum white?" makes sense. Would a stock of common background knowledge (for want of a better word) be that much less effective if it included slightly less Hemingway and Twain and slightly more contributions from more diverse authors? So the argument goes, if (to simplofy a lot) white kids learn about white culture at home and black kids learn about black culture, but the test to get a good job includes the "culture fit" part of can we hold a conversation based on the kinds of analogies and forms of speech you learn at college, then it's (1) unfair if the thing you learn at college just happens to be "white culture" and (2) even more so if a more diverse college education would serve _exactly the same purpose_.

The million dollar question is whether (2) is true. I personally think it mostly is for "arts", mainly because there are different cultures with different languages even within "the west" and several of them seem to work about equally well.

But here's the rub: science doesn't work like that.

There's a philosophical argument that Twain _created_ Huck Finn, but Newton only _discovered_ the laws of motion - if Twain hadn't lived then we might have equally good literature, but it would not be the same. But if Newton hadn't lived, someone else would have discovered F=ma and the like by now, and the formula would be exactly the same.

My main worry is that if the US tries to turn science/tech into liberal arts and China doesn't, then we're creating a new kind of inequality: in a generation or two they will wipe the floor with us. But I'm happy to listen to any argument from the SJ/CRT/I side that doesn't imply us handing over our place in the world to a power who very much believes that all races are not equal.

Attempting to force market-like incentives on the public sector often ends up working even worse than a purely public system, it seems to me. Use public or private, but mixing the two leads to odd incentive issues and bad outcomes.

I have actually learned an awful lot from assembling Ikea furniture. Some of those patterns make their way into my own little projects nowadays.

I still have my father’s MIR books and they seemed to me really practical and pragmatic.

Especially the Smirnov (iirc) ones about differential calculus, where he introduces it with a physics quantification problem.

You could then imagine objects moving around... etc.

Later on he introduces the formal definitions... informally (like “we discussed this and that, let’s call this concept and if you think about it if then “). It’s like a piece of literature or a correspondance.

Compared to that, Bourbakis feel like being lost in a desert without anything to drink nor eat but dry biscuits.

I'm from slovenia, a small, former yugoslav country. We don't have special schools for math here, and elementary schools (7-15yo in my time) were the same for all, and you went to the closest school to your home... but our highschool ("gymnasiums" - 15-19) used the grades from elementary school + standardized testing scores to rank students, and somehow best students went to certain schools, 'the middle' got accepted o others, and shitty students went to shitty schools and other, non-general schools.

The biggest difference wasn't separating kids into math classes and language classes, but genrally separating them by "good" and "bad". Having a random mix of students, where some can barely read, and others read two books per week (or some can barely multiply, while others code math problems for fun), is a very hard job for the professor, because in the end, they have to lower their standards, expectations, and the quantity of material until most students scrape by. Having a group of students that are good at "school stuff", means the teachers are having very little problems with the basics and can continue faster and prepare students better for university and life. If we had separation for stem-talented students, and language-talented and *-talented, it would be even better.

So basically... group better students together, and you can do a lot more with them, if you don't have to pull the 'bad' students behind. I am aware that this is bad for 'bad' students, and that it should be fixable somehow (they should have options to move to better schools), but good students thrive without idiots in class.