Softpanorama Russian Software Bulletin, 2000

www.perl.com - Ilya Regularly Expresses  -- interview with Dr. Ilya Zakharevich

I see you received your Ph.D from Moscow State. Political ideology aside, do you think the Russian education system is more effective than that of the US? What element is most lacking in US higher education today?

IZ: The short answers: you cannot put ideology aside; elementary education.

Now the longer ones. It is extremely difficult to compare the systems. And the results would depend on how deep you are ready to dig. First, consider the purely subjective feelings. (Especially important since "objective" comparisons produce almost pure garbage.) Yes, it feels like the Russian system gives much better results than the U.S. one. On the other hand, look at top level achievers. Obviously, the "stars" in the U.S. were not less starry than the "stars" in the SU.

One of the reasons for a possibly skewed perception is an unbelievable concentration of resources in Russia. Let's look: scratching the surface, SU was significantly larger than US, it is enough to mention 10 (or 11?) time zones. It was a big surprise for me when after several months in US I understood that my feelings about the size were exactly the opposite to the "objective" sizes. Digging into these feelings brought the following conjecture: subjectively SU was a disk with the radius circa 25 miles.

Why? Imagine that 80% of everything good was in Moscow. Out of the rest, 15% were in Leningrad and Kiev. (I'm still subjective!) Well, there is some distance between Moscow and Leningrad, but given sleeper trains, it mostly disappears. This was squeezing resources into a very tight knot. The critical mass requires high mass and high density simultaneously, both were present. The synergetic effects were omnipresent.

Imagine a prevalent migration of talents to metropolises with a negligible back-current. Imagine that top students go not to 25 different universities, but to one, and stay there (the math department in the Moscow University is 5..10 times larger than the largest math departments in the USA). What does this lead to? If you are a good student, then the proportion of good students around you would be much higher.

This skews perceptions, but there is also a giant "objective" boost due to increased interaction between "stars" (and "starlets"). US students in general are much more ready to work hard, but their achievements in the domain of their immediate speciality are only as good as those for Russian students, and not spectacularly better. Typically their knowledge outside this narrow region wishes a lot of improvement.

Additionally, for the most of the beneficial factors, one would not want to copy them. Why "stars" remain in Moscow? Because there was no way to go abroad. What choices there were for a bright kid? Very few. Learn, learn, and learn. What choices there were for philanthropy? Very few. Teach, teach, and teach. Just consider the payroll differential, which was at most 2x--4x. So even if elementary education was relatively low-paying, the enthusiasts would not be stopped by this: the difference was not that striking.

Consider also differences in the spending pattern. It was not absolutely ridiculous to spend 10% or 15% of your income on books. Books being cheap, you could allow yourselves to buy all the decent books in your wide speciality, and several related specialities, not even mentioning what is called "literature" in US. Clearly, there is no way to graft this to the US situation.

Now a theory one of my friends favors, take it at least as a parable: The humanitarian aspect of the elementary education in the U.S. is based on tolerance, basically, all the ideas are considered created equal. Pluralism, respect for opinions of other persons, the ability to look at the problem from different sides and so on. So far so good. Now: math is based on exactly the opposite premise: some arguments are correct, some are wrong. People can tell them apart.

This creates a conflict. Correspondingly, all non-mechanical aspects of math, which is the ultimate device to transfer knowledge in a reproducible way, and to build new knowledge, are censored out (not necessarily consciously). Now kids come to university: "Proof? Eh?" Bad? Would you like to sacrifice the widespread tolerance to improve math?

So my point is: a lot of ground for success of the Russian education system was hardwired into the ideological situation. However, it might be that the situation already bootstrapped itself into a self-supporting state of a widespread readiness to get fascination from a play of mind, even if this play requires some nontrivial mental tension. Maybe this readiness can survive the "return to the normal ideology."

Suppose that all you need is such a readiness in a sufficient number of teachers, and this would create enough interested pupils to form the next generation of such teachers. How to bootstrap such a situation in U.S.? There may be some US-specific answers which I would not be able to even imagine. Something crazy like a philanthropist buying an hour a week on MTV, with MTV specialists who know how to speak to kids-of-today collaborating with science enthusiasts and some cold minds (so that it would not degenerate into another kindergarten like Sesame Street).

Myself, I favor something less focussed on the situation of today. Say, there are teacher's conventions anyway. Why not organize math/physics/chemistry/biology/linguistics problem-solving competition there? It would be quite low-budget. Here I mean "cool" problems, as on international olympiads (but of course, slightly simpler). It should not be hard to find volunteers to design the problems, the Bay Area already has a Russian-style math olympiad running.

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