From: verbit@coolidge.harvard.edu (Mikhail S. Verbitsky)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.soviet
Subject: Re: U.S. students poor performance in math/scienc
Date: 28 Sep 92 22:01:34 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: Sozialistische Patienten Kollektiv

In article <1992Sep25.043233.1087@math.ucla.edu> dstein@rhea.math.ucla.edu (David Stein) writes:
>     Not to mention the alleged superiority in education is quite
>     questionable in the case of China.  As for the former SU, there
>     is a problem of evaluation:  I assume there were serious gaps
>     in education of the Soviets in areas like history, politics, arts,
>     etc.  Were you speaking of math & sciences only?

Not exactly. For example, in my class at high school there were
at least 10 students who memorized the names of *all*
American states (not me, no :). Everybody was supposed
to know the political regime, capital and name of all
100+ foriegn counrties. Of course, the political science
we studied was, er, one-sided (to say the least), but
now in America I learned that this stuff was rather helpful
to understand Western leftist politics. In fact, 
WE LEARNED THE SAME STUFF leftists are propagating
in America, and even better than they know it! 
I believe that this is more than Americans could learn.

To make a valid parallel, suppose that instead of
standard course of the history of religion in US
kids were forced to learn everything about, say,
Satanic cults. As a result, they got not only
the good knowledge of aforementioned cults (which is 
in itself quite useless), but a lot of critical
stuff on the history of other cults.

I believe that leftist critics of the capitalism
is a lot more useful than hypocrisy of its apologists.
As well as the criticism on stupid leftist ideology
is a lot better than its apology. The major difference
is that American schools don't criticize socialism
while Russian ones do criticize imperialism.

Well, and the knowledge of history Soviet
school gave was superb (at least, for the period
before WWII). In my class of high school, 
almost everybody knew more on American
history than most Americans usually do. 
Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, Linkoln,
and Kennedy were supposed to be known, as
well as the Civil War and Independence War.
Sorry for misstranslation: I memorized
these names in Cyrillic.

About literature everybody probably know :)
(usual Soviet propaganda, Soviet people
are most reading people in the world etc etc
Soviet clocks are fastest and Soviet micro-
chips are biggest). There is some truth in this:
the knowledge of Tolstoi and Pushkin in Russia
can be compared only with knowledge of Disney
movies here. In fact, Soviets still do read :)
while everybody else quitted reading a long
time ago. 

A conclusion: well, the humanities in xSU are
not in better state, but nevertheless the school
is quite good, as some of independent researchers
confirm (a favourite tool of Soviet propaganda).
In Russia I did not believe this (as nobody did :),
but in America it seems to be obvious. 

Try reading rec.arts.books for a while. The
misknowledge of Shakespeare and Dickens by literature
majors is incredible. I don't wonder now
why a long while ago one American netter on this board
wrote that Gogol' was suppressed by Tsarist goverment
and could not write in Ukrainian :).
The humanities education there gives people
a lot of misconceptions, some of those
are appaling.

Misha.
Newsgroups: soc.culture.soviet