Read, then reread, and still do not understand your point.
Are you saying that in Russia, since the education was free that the goal of the textbooks was to make it hard to want to stay in school, if so, to me, seems like it’s unlikely, but possible.
Putting aside non-Russian textbooks, what are you saying the intended reasoning of the textbook form was as it relates to Russian culture?
Yes, basically it's sort of a filter to get the people who coast mostly out. Free college means everybody goes to college for bad reasons, or no reason at all, just because everybody else does. I mean, some people openly told me they joined the CS program because they wanted to avoid the draft - a total waste of education.
So, for example the first ~2.5 years (out of 5.5) of my CS degree were mostly about some pretty brutal math units, each with an exam. There was also other stuff from entry level CS to physics to some token humanity courses but that was easy for most.
If you were inclined/smart/persistent enough to master the math (or, sadly, as some did that being Russia - not sure how prevalent that was in the USSR - bribe your way when you failed), you could continue to the easier more fun later years where you actually studied some CS. A considerable number of people transferred or dropped out.
I don't think the books were made hard intentionally.
From what I understand, in the US, the same course on, say, Introduction to Calculus, can be attended by people who are learning to be MDs, chemical engineers, accountants and mathematicians because there is no fixed curriculum and everyone can pick up that course. So the textbooks and courses need to be as accessible as possible to accommodate a wide range of aptitudes.
In Russia/USSR, at least till 90s (don't know if it's still true since there had been a movement to "westernize" education) you enrolled into a major, not a school, and the whole class had the same curriculum for the first two years with some specialization starting on the third year (the whole program is 5-6 years). So students with the same major go to the same courses, which are not shared with any other majors. In this system Introduction to Calculus for mathematicians will be very different from the course with the same name for sociologists and does not have to be as accessible for people who do not really care about strictness of proofs, structure and other "mathy" stuff.
>Are you saying that in Russia, since the education was free that the goal of the textbooks was to make it hard to want to stay in school, if so, to me, seems like it’s unlikely,
in publicly funded systems students cost money, so there's an incentive to control cost. In privately-funded systems, students make money (in particular with universal loans), so everyone's a paying customer and nobody turns those away.
Germany has roughly half the university graduation rate compared to the US, and this is the same reason why the US gives you 8 late-stage cancer treatments and the NHS gives you 2, or why sometimes you don't get the super expensive medicine you want.
No. Because education was free, they could make the books harder. They didn't depend on students pumping money into schools. Didn't have to pretend to be "nice".
(I grew up and went to college in the Eastern Bloc.)
USSR needed X engineers per year. The universities had to set their entry requirements high/low enough to only allow X*1.0X to enroll.
Once enrolled, they were ambitious enough to only allow the best to survive. They watched their bell curves and adjusted accordingly. I'm almost sure the Ministry of Higher Education would publish the guidelines on how to achieve that.
I think the reasoning is that the incentives are flipped. Capitalist school gets more money the more you stick around. Communist school spends more money the more you stick around. One has a perverse incentive to get as many people to pass as possible. The other has a perverse incentive to get as many people to fail as possible.
One would think Russia would have demand for strong advanced mathematics professionals, so unclear how failing students might help that. Missing something in the reasoning though, since I get that if you’re giving away something for free, you want to maximize the yield it returns, but still, it does not add up to me.
Further, reasoning that American schools get money might hold true for tuition based schools, but my understanding is that large percentage of pre-university mathematics courses are taught for free. So again, doesn’t make sense to me, because if that was the case, all schools would charge and majority of students would finish university to maximize the profits, and again, this does not match my understanding of how things work.
I think the point is that Russia's programs isolated those who had a talent/passion for math as opposed to just trying to bring every student to a basic level of understanding. If a student doesn't have the drive/talent/passion for a field, it follows that they will not perform as well in the workforce as their driven/talented/enthusiastic peers.
Are you saying that in Russia, since the education was free that the goal of the textbooks was to make it hard to want to stay in school, if so, to me, seems like it’s unlikely, but possible.
Putting aside non-Russian textbooks, what are you saying the intended reasoning of the textbook form was as it relates to Russian culture?