The article is correct. It's the same attitude that with any form of competition that was deemed a matter of national prestige in USSR: popularized by state throughout all outlets, industrialized through a ranks of special schools and training facilities, and usually devoid of fun that was initially behind the whole thing.
You'd have same approach with sports, ballet, or even high-school level contests in natural science. If there'd existed a world-renowned competition in crosswords, rest assured USSR would have had a nation-wide network of crosswording schools that would've enlisted talented kids at age of 5, three state-approved categories of crossword-manship (and one for juniors) and crossword solving discretely featured in every third motion picture.
But I digress. If you ever got to being a candidate for, say, a national senior-school physics competition, you'd be transferred to region's best teachers. They would train you like a circus dog, showing you the tricks and running you through hundreds of assignments encountered in previous years, with no focus on the essence of physics. Granted you'd know a lot about pulleys and levers and displacement, but it wouldn't make you any good physicist.
> If you ever got to being a candidate for, say, a national senior-school physics competition, you'd be transferred to region's best teachers. They would train you like a circus dog [...] but it wouldn't make you any good physicist.
Being one of such people, this is not entirely accurate.
For one thing, there is no practice of transferring students to best teachers, you have to want it get into the better schools. Another thing is that the best teachers are precisely the people who understand and will show you the essence of physics (or whatever your subject is).
Yes, a lot of time is devoted to competitions with repetitive problem set (the olympiads). But then, lots of time is devoted to non-competition topics. There are also competitions with open problems which require lots of imagination and original research on your part (e.g. ТЮФ, ТРИЗ and МАН for those who know). Some of the better schools require each student to complete a research project in his subject of choice.
My point here is that "circus dog training" is not at all correct.
> If you ever got to being a candidate for, say, a national senior-school physics competition, you'd be transferred to region's best teachers.
This is not a bad thing. It is completely the opposite to some Western ideals to ensure that everyone gets the same (bad) education. I think that the motto for a lot of guys on the left is that if everyone is kept behind no-one loses.
> It is completely the opposite to some Western ideals to ensure that everyone gets the same (bad) education.
School education is not a good predictor of future performance. I would venture to say that above some (fairly modest) threshold of quality, the difference in schooling is irrelevant.
> What is incredibly interesting to note is that Russia and several eastern bloc countries perform better than the USA in math (school age – according to OECD TIMMS test).
This is not what made the great Russian mathematicians though. You don't get feynmanns and turings by locking up kids to solve monotonous puzzles.
> In all fairness, the USSR did produce quite a few excellent physicists. Per capita it probably outranks the USA for Nobel Prize winners in Physics.
Of course it doesn't. Even the UK is way ahead of USSR on that metric.
There were plenty of great Soviet physicists and champions in other sciences, but bear in mind that at least half of them were product of pre-Soviet, imperial school system.
> School education is not a good predictor of future performance. I would venture to say that above some (fairly modest) threshold of quality, the difference in schooling is irrelevant.
I beg to differ. School performance in mathematics and science directly impacts on the careers of people. A good example is engineering – it is pretty difficult for someone to study engineering without a good and solid mathematical foundation.
> Of course it doesn't. Even the UK is way ahead of USSR on that metric.
The UK and the USA is per capita twice to three times as rich as Russia/USSR. Britain also has the advantage of drawing out all of the brains out of the Commonwealth. A large percentage of American PhDs came from Europe (either Jews who fled or Germans who came afterwards). A lot of them were not educated in the USA.
I would venture that the Soviet Union/Russia’s scientific accomplishments is pretty spectacular for when all is taken into account.
You'd have same approach with sports, ballet, or even high-school level contests in natural science. If there'd existed a world-renowned competition in crosswords, rest assured USSR would have had a nation-wide network of crosswording schools that would've enlisted talented kids at age of 5, three state-approved categories of crossword-manship (and one for juniors) and crossword solving discretely featured in every third motion picture.
But I digress. If you ever got to being a candidate for, say, a national senior-school physics competition, you'd be transferred to region's best teachers. They would train you like a circus dog, showing you the tricks and running you through hundreds of assignments encountered in previous years, with no focus on the essence of physics. Granted you'd know a lot about pulleys and levers and displacement, but it wouldn't make you any good physicist.