Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

palladiummag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 251 posts

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#211

Post by slt2021 »

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…

You are a product of a neo-colonialist system.

In the age of knowledge work, brain drain from poor countries to rich countries is no different than stealing oil or gold resources.

Yes it works well for you, but that's because system is setup in that way.

Global capitalists are sharing a little bit of value with you so you remain content, while raping your country of all future potential by brain draining the nation.

In case the country decides to develop itself, instead of being a colony: they quickly reverse the election results and appoint their colonial administrator as president.

If you don't see the neocolonialism here, how capitalist is raping the future of your nation, I don't know how else to explain it to you

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#212

Post by slt2021 »

oytis wrote: post #119
slt2021 wrote: post #42

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

That's a problem with the opportunity in the country rather with the schools. Being able to produce exceptional students is an advantage, now figure out how to make them stay.

Romania was structurally handicapped after joining EU: they were forced to de-industrialize and lost their competitive manufacturing sectors, because Romania was not allowed to compete with other EU members.

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#213

Post by alephnerd »

jmspring wrote: post #60
alephnerd wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you! Give students the ability to test out of classes and/or dual enroll in community colleges, BUT make sure they are all still in the same school meeting and greeting and bumping into each other. Dumbing down curricula is a bad move, and preventing students from being able to test out or take classes earlier is also a bad move. But segregating students into different schools based on academic ability i…

The funny thing, I went to five schools, 3 different districts across Bay Area cities. All had accommodations for different levels. High school, I ended up at UCSC my freshman year with enough credits from transfer in (from high school school) and my first quarter as a junior. Most were community college courses friends and I were interested in separate from school. My step daughter, I hear her curriculum and shake m…

Not to be that guy, but in my parent's old country - someone like your daughter would not have been given a chance to even get a bachelors degree. And we're from a country with the same tracked educational system as Romania.

I agree that "common core" is bulls** (I'm part of that generation as well, but my Asian parents made me take Kumon and taught me personally, but I was also lucky/blessed that my mother was a teacher in the old country), but the motivation wasn't wrong.

And this is what pains me about American educational reform. It has become ideological, instead of outcome driven.

Personally, our outcomes should be

1. Building a talented workforce (we need more October Skys)

2. Giving space for creativity (we need more Darias)

3. Building physical fitness (we need more Currahee Hill montages, as an ex-ROTC [found out I'd lose my OCI if I commissioned])

And this requires giving students autonomy to explore their limits mentally and physically. If peeps don't want to learn, nbd, but why should we limit access to students who want to but didn't initially build the fundamentals.

We also need to decouple emotion from education - no major or degree is better or worse than others. We should treat a HS grad, an AA/AS grad, a BA/BS/BE grad, andn a grad school grad the same.

Let's be a "Great Society" [0] again.

[0] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KuuEFTgodc8

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#214

Post by Viliam1234 »

saagarjha wrote: post #106
koolba wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Of course, you are an enlightened parent that is better than all those other parents that spoil their children and prevent them from achieving all that they could do. More seriously, though, good and bad parents exist everywhere. It is intellectually lazy to call other people's kids tendie eaters because you think they are underserved. Grow up, man.

> More seriously, though, good and bad parents exist everywhere.

Yes. And if makes a great difference which ones decide what the educational system will look like.

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#215

Post by Viliam1234 »

ibobev wrote: post #125

Actually, throughout Eastern Europe, there was an excellent math and science curriculum during the socialist era. Despite all the negatives of this system, the good education was one of the huge positives. In the last 30 years in Bulgaria, there has been a significant decline, but some good traditions are still maintained, at least in the elite schools.

I suspect that an important factor was that math was sufficiently abstract so that the smart people could go there and do their thing without risk of saying something that would offend the regime. If you said something carelessly in economy, you might have disagreed with Lenin. If you said something carelessly in biology, you might have disagreed with Lysenko. But in math, you could say anything you wanted, and you were okay. And in communism you were not allowed to start your own company anyway, which is why many smart people became math teachers instead.

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#216

Post by Viliam1234 »

constantinum wrote: post #52

TL;DR "With all the pieces on the board, the key to Romania’s Olympiad success is three-fold: put the best students in the same classrooms, put the best teachers with the best students, and then incentivize schools, teachers, and students each to win Olympiads."

The easiest way to understand why it works is to imagine the opposite strategy: put the best students in the same classrooms as the worst one so the entire class advances very slowly, make the school system centered on success at sport.

(I skipped the opposite to "put the best teachers with the best students" part, because if those best students are each in a different class, one of them will randomly get the best teacher and the others won't.)

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#217

Post by whimsicalism »

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…

This “elite overproduction” drivel needs to die out. It is not scientific or mathematical, it is just pop sociology. Producing a well educated populace is good, actually.

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#218

Post by Viliam1234 »

slt2021 wrote: post #211
credit_guy wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are a product of a neo-colonialist system. In the age of knowledge work, brain drain from poor countries to rich countries is no different than stealing oil or gold resources. Yes it works well for you, but that's because system is setup in that way. Global capitalists are sharing a little bit of value with you so you remain content, while raping your country of all future potential by brain draining the nation.…

So what you suggest instead is that smart people from poor countries should stay where they are, even if it means they won't get the opportunity to fully use their talent (because that would be expensive, and the country does not have the money for that)? Like, maybe someone could go to USA and find a cure for cancer, but it's better if they stay in Romania and become e.g. a teacher instead?

During communism, many countries were literally surrounded by barbed wire to prevent their smartest people from escaping. But that didn't make those countries prosper. Yes, the smart people remained there, but they were not allowed to use their skills fully, so it didn't make a difference.

> If you don't see the neocolonialism here, how capitalist is raping the future of your nation, I don't know how else to explain it to you

You think communists raping you with a barbed wire is better? Maybe for the communists, but not for the people.

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#219

Post by Viliam1234 »

hellojimbo wrote: post #84

Hungarian jews are also extremely smart anecdotally.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid...

Von Neumann, Wigner, and possibly Teller all went to the same central Budapest high school at about the same time, leading a friend to joke about the atomic bomb being basically a Hungarian high school science fair project.

Re: Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

#220

Post by Viliam1234 »

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…

> But surprisingly many participants come from Transylvania.

Makes sense, vampires have enough time to learn advanced math.

Post reply on HN