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Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

palladiummag.com

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Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#131

Post by lozenge »

Plankaluel wrote: post #122

I have to say: After all the talk in the article how the Romanian system makes part of the population perform higher by throwing a lot of the resources at them, lowering the performance of the people that are already below average. Which is a problem for Romania because a lot of the highly educated people leave the country afterwards ... I was not really prepared for the final sentence where the author recommends as…

Well, a lot of countries aren't worth leaving. Taking my home of the UK as an example, Wikipedia lists 19 countries with higher GDP per capita, but if I don't want to learn a new language, overcome bureaucratic obstacles and leave my family behind, there is nowhere to go and this criteria describes almost everybody who gets an education here, even the smart ones. Romania is #53 on the list and their EU membership means they can emigrate easily.

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#132

Post by lozenge »

hemabe wrote: post #102

I noticed this phenomenon several years ago and came to the following conclusions: Romania is strongly multi-ethnic. Germans from Saxony and Swabia immigrated to Transylvania 800 years ago. A thousand years ago, people from northern India immigrated, whom we now know as Gypsies and who make up 8-10% of the population. In the south, the country was besieged by the Ottomans/Turks for 400 years. The cognitive difference…

When people say groups are different, such as one ethnic group from another, they are looking at averages. It has very little relevance to looking at the top performers in a field. Each country only brings six people to IMO.

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#133

Post by lozenge »

credit_guy wrote: post #48
slt2021 wrote: post #42

Romania is wasting taxpayer money to groom bright students and then let them leave Romania for some higher GDP country

I would downvote you, but I won't, and instead I will leave a reply. I was one of those students who left. Romania did not waste any more taxpayer money on me than on other students, and that money that it spent was really meager by any Western standards. My kids now go to public school in NYC. The city spends north of $30k for each of them [1]. Yet, if they decide to leave the US nobody will complain that they were…

I'm assuming you went to a good school in Romania, with good teachers. Well the teacher's salary might be the same as any other school, but the quality of your teachers came at the expense of the quality of teaching in other schools.

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#134

Post by objektif »

progbits wrote: post #101
laserbeam wrote: post #68

As a Romanian who has been very involved in Olympiads as a kid, I can tell that most of this is accurate. I’ve also lived in Denmark at university for several years and can contrast educational systems from first hand experience. The sorting the author describes absolutely DOES happen in Romania. Exactly as he describes it, “getting into a good school” is incredibly important for students and parents here. I’d also l…

I have mixed feelings. "Educating the masses" is important, at least to a certain baseline, otherwise we get failing democracies due to manipulation of uneducated voters. But it's important to still have a separate track for the best students. Those will grow up to do the important work and move the society forward. If you put them into a mediocre class it will waste their potential.

Unfortunately, in my class of students, being good at solving Olympiad level questions did not turn out to be a good predictor of their contributions to society.

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#135

Post by ancillary »

koolba wrote: post #47
ecshafer wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to agree with you. Children are adaptable and will rise to the challenge. The west too often prefers to think children are capable of nothing, and have them wallow in an intellectual void.

It’s not just intellectual challenge that parents are unwilling to entertain. It’s part of a wider problem of avoiding any and all confrontation. The moment a child shows any disinterest, the activity is shut down. It’s why you have a generation of kids that only eat chicken fingers and french fries. The average parent is unwilling to even teach their children to eat and enjoy actual food. Why bother when you can jus…

This level of generalization and certainty shouted down from the moral high ground is the hallmark of a great comment!

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#136

Post by stefantalpalaru »

mittensc wrote: post #93
ddalex wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but that's not why he was elected president. Well, not directly. His Olympiad results led to him getting a doctorate at Sorbonne, which led to him speaking french, which led to impressing Macron who threw France's weight into supporting Dan. It was a power move to replace the German influence with French influence (previous praesident was ethnic German)

That's a really naive and wrong take. He is popular, he was elected mayor of Bucharest. He led a lot of anti corruption efforts for a very long time. (founded USB/USR) He is smart (as you noted by olympiad, speaking multiple foreign languages) He is religious as well (pretty important aparently) All his opponents were much less competent. A PSD candidate will never be president in a two term election unless the count…

[dead]

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#137

Post by eric-burel »

"Because Romania is a member state of the European Union, the people the country has put great effort into training and credentialing are easily able to leave the country and acquire jobs elsewhere" and "free movement of talent between countries, Romania ends up subsidizing talent discovery for other countries with less apt educational systems" Are pretty negative stances. UE is a union, so it's a pretty different situation than students leaving eg third world country to come to Europe. And the migration exists in the other direction, you'll be amazed by how many French dentists are studying in Romania. I hope such phenomenon progressively average the situation between UE countries and closes the gaps that may currently exist.

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#138

Post by ACCount37 »

somenameforme wrote: post #96
laserbeam wrote: post #68

As a Romanian who has been very involved in Olympiads as a kid, I can tell that most of this is accurate. I’ve also lived in Denmark at university for several years and can contrast educational systems from first hand experience. The sorting the author describes absolutely DOES happen in Romania. Exactly as he describes it, “getting into a good school” is incredibly important for students and parents here. I’d also l…

The practical issue which so many people don't seem to want to acknowledge is that students are different. I have taught and there are some students that simply lack either the intelligence, discipline, interest, or some other aspect that makes it literally impossible for them to ever receive anything beyond a basic education. You could give them 10 on 1 specialized instruction from the the most competent/interesting…

People talk about intelligence a lot, but the sheer difference in interest is just as big, if not a bigger factor.

In an average class, you get most kids - who are mostly content to be there. And then you get the outliers. There's that one kid who appears to be suffering something just short of physical pain whenever he's in class learning something. Then there's the kid who has already read all his textbooks in the first week, for fun, and even retained a lot of it, because he was engaged with the material.

They may have the same exact intelligence, but the outcomes could not be more different.

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#139

Post by stefantalpalaru »

credit_guy wrote: post #48
slt2021 wrote: post #42

Romania is wasting taxpayer money to groom bright students and then let them leave Romania for some higher GDP country

I would downvote you, but I won't, and instead I will leave a reply. I was one of those students who left. Romania did not waste any more taxpayer money on me than on other students, and that money that it spent was really meager by any Western standards. My kids now go to public school in NYC. The city spends north of $30k for each of them [1]. Yet, if they decide to leave the US nobody will complain that they were…

[dead]

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#140

Post by morsecodist »

sinuhe69 wrote: post #126
progbits wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have mixed feelings. "Educating the masses" is important, at least to a certain baseline, otherwise we get failing democracies due to manipulation of uneducated voters. But it's important to still have a separate track for the best students. Those will grow up to do the important work and move the society forward. If you put them into a mediocre class it will waste their potential.

I can only agree. Higher education for the mass is dangerous, especially when there are not enough jobs for them and they have to take a heavy loan to finance their education. Peter Turchin has developed a mathematical model to predict the collapse of a society and one of the main factors is an over-supply of graduates (or elites). Adding to it the dynamics of AI and smart robots, the effect of over-supply can be onl…

I am extremely skeptical of this mathematical model to predict history thing. There's just not enough history to do it and you bake in your biases when you go through the qualitative historical record and try to assign it to quantities. A lot of people analyze history and claim they figured it out and they've come to different conclusions and none of them have made reliable, specific conditions. If you say something bad will happen at some point in the future you'll probably be right but it's not enough to call it science.
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