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

Level of school while it is supposed to be same is night and day. The special Math/Physics school is one thing, but under that there are “good” schools in the city, ok, shitty then you have countryside etc

Same thing applies to other countries. Depending on where you went to school in same city you experience can be vastly different. Some school in let’s say Toronto have A- Math in high school average, other 20mins by bicycle can be C-. In Moscow you can have an awesome school, take metro for 30 mins and only thing you are learning is how to not get shit beaten out of you during a class break.

I went to a very good city school in Kyiv till grade 8, then specialized Math/Physics school from then on(I was bottom of the barrel at the new school in Math ouch). I used to come to my old school sometimes to hangout, level was absolutely different as in nobody there could solve a single problem in my home work. University exam at KGU in physics I took 1 hours instead of 3. But this is a trick. Once you get in second round of weeding out starts, I remember the breakdown people had after first couple tests. People who had 5 on all subjects their whole life, but they went to normal school. I think more then half of them did not make it through first semester.

I then left to Canada and went to middle of the road University there for Comp Sci. Honestly I liked it far more. It was more fun and flexible in terms of what you could take and learn, I could do a minor in Economics half way through because I liked it. I could work as research assistant in later and actually get my name on a paper and then go to a conference in Vegas :)

For the positions like for example even drivers for the high party members it starts getting unequal.

And about the nineties: inequality in the nineties is weird because very large amount of the criminals who got rich didn't bother to educate their children. Of course, some part of them opted for expensive teachers/schools or for sending children to the Western schools, but the "getting by force" attitude of the parents didn't really mesh well with learning.

That is absolutely orthogonal to business requirements to be honest.

Especially when you need to establish production of anything as primitive as N95s.

Of course you can send airplanes all around the world for them (https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-at-least-tw...) but when they will return empty, that thin reasoning layer will vaporize almost immediately.

American 4 year degrees require you getting a reasonably well rounded education.

I have a 4 year degree in comp sci but I was required to learn state history, Biology, Chemistry, Geology, Art, Communications, and probably some other things off the top of my head that I've forgotten.

My issue with the US system is that the universities in general are pretty good, but before university the education is garbage. All of these "well rounded" things I just mentioned they could have easily taught me in high school instead of wasting so much time on random things or reteaching the same things over and over.

Essentially because of the cost of US uni they wasted my money making me have to pay for my well rounded education and now upon writing this I just realized that despite the downgrade so to speak I would prefer a British degree as I think theyre shorter and if I'm to pay I just want to get what I came for which is CS skills.

I believe British kids(non-Scottish ones) have to pay some amount for Uni right? Do you pay in Poland? This could be part of the reason for the difference.

It was definitely a thing where I went to college. The humanities classes were very easy compared to the engineering/science/math classes. The school required them to try and round people out. But the humanities teachers were lazy or unskilled enough that it became exceedingly easy for people to cheat.

The canonical example is the humanities teacher who gives the exact same tests every time he/she teaches the class for 20 years. After a couple years every fraternity & sorority had a file in their study room that had every assignment & test problem that professor ever gave. So you'd have one student from the fraternity/sorority who was low on the totem pole go to class to collect the homework/requirements. Everyone else would just look at the test files to get the answers and then show up for the tests. Generally everyone would get an A, including the students who never went to class except on test days.

This was partly evil, but it was also partly students prioritizing their work hours on the vastly harder courses they were taking in their fields of study, namely the courses that were important to doing well in their field.

I graduated with a 3.7, I didn't really cheat like this, but I did put lower priority on getting top marks in the humanities class. If I got a B in a humanities class in order to allow myself to spend more time on a Computer Science class so that I could get an A in the CS class instead of a B or C that was fine with me.

At the high school level in the US everything is bifurcated into a two tier system.. one tier for the serious students who want to do well and go to college. Another tier that is state sponsored baby sitting for the students who don't want to do well and whose parents don't care.