> Those books are head and shoulders above any school textbook I've seen in the US.
Most textbooks seem to like to have stupid things like "math connections to the real world" and large pictures of unrelated topics in a desperate attempt to appear relevant, all the while serving up repetitive problems that are a copy of an example so that teachers and students can just look back at them without really understanding what they're doing. Personally, I think it's really hard to use books like this in the classroom as it's structured currently because it's considered a bad thing to have problems that are essentially unsolvable for most of the class.
> it's considered a bad thing to have problems that are essentially unsolvable for most of the class.
It's really sad, for two reasons. First, most problems in most AoPS books are solvable (or at least should be) for most of the class, especially if you exclude problems marked with asterisks. They're not that different from old Soviet or Polish math textbooks, and pretty much everyone was supposed to be able to solve that.
Second, having only problems that everyone in the class can solve means that nobody in the class advances much. You can't learn to run 5k by walking 5k.
Most textbooks seem to like to have stupid things like "math connections to the real world" and large pictures of unrelated topics in a desperate attempt to appear relevant, all the while serving up repetitive problems that are a copy of an example so that teachers and students can just look back at them without really understanding what they're doing. Personally, I think it's really hard to use books like this in the classroom as it's structured currently because it's considered a bad thing to have problems that are essentially unsolvable for most of the class.