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Comment by stefantalpalaru | Hacker News Reader

There are many factors - most of them economic and cultural - but it all starts with an intense maths syllabus in school, Soviet Union style. Here's the current one for 5th to 8th grade: https://www.scribd.com/document/184259748/The-Romanian-Maths...

Most kids are overwhelmed by the complexity and volume (homework is brutal) but those few with an aptitude for it thrive and are picked up quickly by teachers looking to mentor them further for local, national and international contests.

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That is roughly equivalent to what I did in honors math in the 90s in the US.

Looking over the math curriculum in the same school district today, the current level of instruction doesn't even come close. Standards have sadly fallen.

School in Romania in the 90s was way harder than it is now. Standards have dropped (a lot) here as well.

My grade school education in the US was similar to this (although you needed to qualify for "accelerated" math). There were maybe 90 people every year in this. Those who did well did not make it much past CML or AMC, maybe out of lack of interest. You had to be excellent to move on to Olympiad level maths.

Side note: I have many objections with the competition-ifaction of these things. Not everyone finds their best performance in a competition environment. In CS, maybe we would look at competitive programming and CTFs (arguably CP can be very mathematical). Nonetheless, we use competitions to measure performance, which in some way selects out people who are talented in a setting that isn't a competition, and glorifies people who do play the game.

Having seen what children are capable of, it’s neither overwhelming nor brutal.

What’s truly brutal is acquiescing to children droning away their youth mindlessly clicking meaningless games or watching vacuous streaming content. We live in what could be a golden age of thought but for the average kid it’s anything but.

I have to agree with you. Children are adaptable and will rise to the challenge. The west too often prefers to think children are capable of nothing, and have them wallow in an intellectual void.

It’s not just intellectual challenge that parents are unwilling to entertain. It’s part of a wider problem of avoiding any and all confrontation. The moment a child shows any disinterest, the activity is shut down.

It’s why you have a generation of kids that only eat chicken fingers and french fries. The average parent is unwilling to even teach their children to eat and enjoy actual food. Why bother when you can just heat up some tendies?

> It’s why you have a generation of kids that only eat chicken fingers and french fries.

I’m 42 years old and something like this was already said about kids when I was a child (I suspect it was like that before my time as well). Children’s palate develops with age and so does their taste.

Don’t know about that…it’s not some rule that palate develops with age. You have to actively try. And when you grow up on a diet consisting of limited foods, you will definitely have problems appreciating a variety of foods a ps an adult. Pretty sure that’s the main reason average restaurant food quality in the US is so bad. The customers can’t even tell the difference because their palate is so limited.

Of course, you are an enlightened parent that is better than all those other parents that spoil their children and prevent them from achieving all that they could do. More seriously, though, good and bad parents exist everywhere. It is intellectually lazy to call other people's kids tendie eaters because you think they are underserved. Grow up, man.

> It is intellectually lazy to call other people's kids tendie eaters because you think they are underserved.

It’s anecdata for sure, but it’s not a metaphor. I literally mean the parents are eating “real food” while regularly feeding the children just butter noodles and chicken fingers. The diet is a microcosm of their entire upbringing.

I ate plenty of junk when I was a child, too. Children love chicken nuggets and applesauce. Let them do their thing, within reason of course. I turned out ok.

> More seriously, though, good and bad parents exist everywhere.

Yes. And if makes a great difference which ones decide what the educational system will look like.

This level of generalization and certainty shouted down from the moral high ground is the hallmark of a great comment!

While I think the west is a huge generalization, I don't think the west thinks children are capable of nothing. It's more about letting children be children and play. Rather than forcing them to "work" almost constantly from a very young age.

I don't really envy the school systems that force kids to work very hard from an early age to get into a fancy university. From what I understand it's usually school systems with a heavy focus on rote memorization as well and that takes up quite a bit of time with diminishing results.

Having been through a post-Soviet school system, it's not about rote memorization, at least not in maths. The point is spending as much time with a problem as necessarily, without having a predefined algorithm, until it cracks. It's such a useful skill and satisfying experience that I feel sad that some children are denied it for the sake of psychological comfort.

> What’s truly brutal is acquiescing to children droning away their youth mindlessly clicking meaningless games or watching vacuous streaming content

Both of these things are droning. One is just culturally acceptable. Don't think so? Stop by your local Kumon center some time.

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