I guess Western Europe isn't part of the West anymore.

Several universities switched from entrance exams to a system of "Everybody gets in, it is the first semester that will probably kill you" :-)

On my first year, the amount of students was 2x the actual capacity. The first semester was very math-heavy, and everyone knew we had the toughest and CS-unrelated subjects delivered up front in order to weed out half of the year.

On the other hand, I have seen a prof. literaly say something along the lines "Dear students, my purpose here is not to teach you anything, just weed out 50% of you"

Corporal punishment was common when the Prussian system was founded (1800s) across the world.

The system provided free education for the lowest rungs of society for the first time in Europe, that's a mighty achievement!

Pedagogically it is a hierarchical system with a strong focus on authority. It doesn't encourage questioning authority outside of the sciences which is a feature for the authoritarian societies deploying this educational model.

With my University diploma I've also got a rank of Lieutenant-reserve of РВСН (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Missile_Forces) so the procedure is metaphorically close :D

What I remember the most was the contrast between the English language textbooks from ~80s vs. the ones I had in school. The modern ones basically exist for both publishers and schools to milk parents. They come in three or four pieces - a book and an exercise book for students, and then an exercise book with answers and some compendium for teachers. That's four books, structured in a way that necessitates attending (and paying for) classes. Meanwhile, the 60s-80s era English books were structured for self-learning. You could work through them with the help of a teacher, or you could do it alone.

(Note that while being self-contained, they've also managed to be smaller. That's because they were free of space fillers. Being set on something one step up from a typewriter limited the amount of bullshit designers could include to zero.)

By the time I was finishing high school in 2007, the regular public school's textbooks for subjects like Polish, math and physics have suffered from the same disease English language books did - they've been split into several pieces, refreshed yearly (ensuring there's almost no second-hand market for them), and structured in such a way you couldn't learn on your own.

I have a few of my grandfather's English books in my basement somewhere; I decided to keep them for my children, so that they have a quality textbook to learn from.

That said, soviet style education produced a lot of great mathematicians especially relative to population sizes. But it’s not clear to me if that’s an outgrowth of better education or economic forces.

There is no reason why a calculus book needs to cost $200 (in the 1990’s) and get refreshed every 2-3 years. That subject has been known for hundreds of years and they rob poor engineering and science student of that $200.

Sorry, I just have a bad taste in my mouth from crap like that in undergrad. Not saying you’re wrong, just think it’s more greed oriented than we’d like to think.

A typical author would get somewhere between 4-7% of the net sales. Most books, especially advanced science books, on the market (not your College 101, not NYT bestsellers) sell only in the order of hundreds, maybe a few thousand copies. The vast majority of books doesn't even earn the advance back. The reason why they are often not good, is that it takes months to write 500 pages of well-thought out, well-delivered material, and the incentive to do that for $5000 is relatively low.

Professors write tons of pages on various topics as part of their job. We call that “research”. Not sure why contributing to a book effort should be looked at any differently than research papers.

Plus, from an economic sense, when you lower the price of a compliment, your demand g or price ) goes up. So it’s actually in a university’s interest to provide books for free (or very low cost).

So, let's suppose that you indeed sell 1,000 copies at $150 a piece. Your share is 6% of the net sales, so $8370. From this you need to pay services such as the person making the index, or pay royalty for pictures (yes, many publishing houses deduct this from the author's earnings).

Let's say your book has 700 pages, which is pretty normal volume size, and after you paid for additional services and expenses you are left with $7000. You are a good writer, so planning the book, writing it, creating examples, copy-editing and rewriting it, making reference solutions, etc. and you only spend on average 4h per page. You have made $2.50 / hour before tax. And you probably have a PhD in that topic.

If Stan Lee wrote calculus textbooks, everyone would be good at math. [0]

[0] - ok, so I came up with that off the top of my head. But the more I think about it, the better the idea seems to me. Any thoughts?

The pricing model of the current locked-in science publication sector is completely ridiculous, counter-productive and even unjustified (research in many countries is supported by taxes, than the result should be free to the public). But luckily this changes with open access - legal and not yet legal.

edit: and not to forget, in some areas the soviet school of mathematics (meant as specific incarnation of mathematics as a discipline in the country) was excellent in itself.

It is not possible to “educate” someone about mathematics or math-heavy technical fields without convincing them to put in some serious time and effort thinking deeply about hard problems.

Many US high school (and even undergraduate) textbooks are more or less analogous to taking a look-out-from-the-bus tour of rock climbing sites, or maybe like teaching an advanced wood shop class by making students assemble IKEA furniture.

Textbooks should be exciting and fun, but “as easy as possible” is a terrible goal.

I and all this ^ might be wrong, though.

As of Canadian Universities. UBC in particular.

Anecdotical evidence, but still.

Friend of mine, owner of small factory here in Vancouver, asked me once to assemble him software department specifically from Eastern Europe people. On question "why?" he answered - they are engineers first and programmers only second, and UBC makes CS people.

I hope your friend realizes that this is clear-cut racial/ethnicity-based discrimination.

It's a violation of the Canadian Human Rights Act, see: https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/rights-w...

I suppose if you try to do it at scale though there are other mechanisms for calling you out on deliberately circumventing the spirit of the law.

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.

Actually, many if not most of them get the majority of their funding from government research grants and investments of their endowment, not tuition.

Are you saying that in Russia, since the education was free that the goal of the textbooks was to make it hard to want to stay in school, if so, to me, seems like it’s unlikely, but possible.

Putting aside non-Russian textbooks, what are you saying the intended reasoning of the textbook form was as it relates to Russian culture?

That is probably not that intentionally. That is just a result of my own observations.

As of culture:

Canadian mother: John, you are so smart, why you cannot solve this quiz?

Russian mother: Ivan, why you cannot solve this quiz, are you stupid?

Anecdotic exaggeration of course, but there is definitely something in it.

So, for example the first ~2.5 years (out of 5.5) of my CS degree were mostly about some pretty brutal math units, each with an exam. There was also other stuff from entry level CS to physics to some token humanity courses but that was easy for most. If you were inclined/smart/persistent enough to master the math (or, sadly, as some did that being Russia - not sure how prevalent that was in the USSR - bribe your way when you failed), you could continue to the easier more fun later years where you actually studied some CS. A considerable number of people transferred or dropped out.

From what I understand, in the US, the same course on, say, Introduction to Calculus, can be attended by people who are learning to be MDs, chemical engineers, accountants and mathematicians because there is no fixed curriculum and everyone can pick up that course. So the textbooks and courses need to be as accessible as possible to accommodate a wide range of aptitudes.

In Russia/USSR, at least till 90s (don't know if it's still true since there had been a movement to "westernize" education) you enrolled into a major, not a school, and the whole class had the same curriculum for the first two years with some specialization starting on the third year (the whole program is 5-6 years). So students with the same major go to the same courses, which are not shared with any other majors. In this system Introduction to Calculus for mathematicians will be very different from the course with the same name for sociologists and does not have to be as accessible for people who do not really care about strictness of proofs, structure and other "mathy" stuff.

in publicly funded systems students cost money, so there's an incentive to control cost. In privately-funded systems, students make money (in particular with universal loans), so everyone's a paying customer and nobody turns those away.

Germany has roughly half the university graduation rate compared to the US, and this is the same reason why the US gives you 8 late-stage cancer treatments and the NHS gives you 2, or why sometimes you don't get the super expensive medicine you want.

(I grew up and went to college in the Eastern Bloc.)

Further, reasoning that American schools get money might hold true for tuition based schools, but my understanding is that large percentage of pre-university mathematics courses are taught for free. So again, doesn’t make sense to me, because if that was the case, all schools would charge and majority of students would finish university to maximize the profits, and again, this does not match my understanding of how things work.

They make the student work (participate actively in your own education), which I’ve noticed that American textbooks (at least modern high school & college textbooks) seem loath to do. I don’t know why — you don’t develop what you don’t exercise!

Russian math books have just few words, formulas are the rest. What can be poorly written there?

Kidding :)

In 1990's after the revolution we got humanitarian aid from Western Europe, including some French math textbooks. They were so low level (simple) I was in disbelief. Useless.

my take is that the western-style school focuses on getting students life skills, while the eastern-Europe one focuses on cramming knowledge in the brain

It's been long enough where I have no idea of the author.

Also, the enjoyment was not supposed to be from reading the book, it was from passing the exam.